The anti-corporate movement is different from the anti-Capitalist movement in one specific way.  The anti-corporate movement is a part of the anti-Capitalist movement that focuses on one specific cause of problems and other problems closely related to that.

You remember what I said back in the first book about how corporations fulfill all five of the criteria necessary to qualify as a life form?  In order to qualify as a life form, a thing must: behave in a manner conducive to self-preservation; grow and reproduce; transfer energy systematically; react to stimuli; and be distinctly different from its surrounding environment. If you consider the artificial environment of the marketplace to be the natural environment of the corporation, then a corporation does all of these things.

If you prefer a different definition of life, evolution depends on variation, replication, and selection.  That’s how the genes that create us evolve, so by extension, anything that does all of those things creates a life form.  As Dr. Richard Dawkins discovered back in 1976, ideas are transmitted from person to person, change over time, and adapt to new situations.  That means that ideas fulfill the variation, replication, and selection qualifications, and that makes ideas a life form whose environment is our brains.  I’ll talk more about that later in the book.  For now my point is, that definition of life also proves that a corporation is a life form, because a corporation is a collection of ideas that are really good at helping to propagate each other.

As corporations are recognized by the American legal system, a corporation is nothing but an agreement among people, but it’s granted independent entity-hood by the government.  Then, as each person who works for the corporation acts to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them—by going to work every morning and doing their jobs—they make the corporation function.  And by each of them contributing their part to it, collectively they make the corporation function as an artificial life form whose goal is to make profits.  Not to serve people but to make profits.  The corporation is not capable of recognizing people as anything other than a means to move money from one place to another, because in creating this artificial life form, nobody thought—or even knew how—to write in a definition of how to serve the needs of humanity.

Well guess what. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution deals with how corporations are to be set up.  It states, “corporations are entitled to all the rights of people…” and then spells out some more rights corporations are entitled to.  So under the U.S. Constitution, corporations have more rights than people do.  They say we have a government of, by, and for the people, but if corporations have more rights than people do, is it any surprise that corporations are taking over?

You just might say that the Founding Fathers f*cked up in a big way here.  This is what happens when people who believe in supernatural forces try to set up secular governments.  The Founding Fathers were using a fictitious history of the world to give them their sense of cause and effect that led from the beginning of the world up the present day, and then they tried to use that imaginary chain of cause and effect to predict how events were going to unfold in the future.  And it didn’t f*ckin’ work, did it?

To be fair, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution long before the Theory of Evolution, the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the Big Bang were discovered, so they had no way of knowing in secular terms how the world began and how it got from there to the present day.  So they did what everyone has always done and tried to figure it out themselves.  But now that we can recognize that they had fundamental errors in their understanding of how the world worked, and we can see that those fairly simple mistakes they made in the past are causing big problems for us now, we can choose to take action to solve the problem.

The words “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, and “corporations are entitled to all the same rights as people plus…” cannot possibly both exist in the same document and make that document self-consistent.  It’s pretty obvious the Founding Fathers intended us to have a government of, by, and for the people.  But it’s also pretty obvious that they believed in a Christian version of human behavior, that everyone is inherently good and is only tempted to commit evil, or something along those lines.

Well people aren’t inherently good.  And the Founding Fathers accidentally wrote a gigantic loophole into the Constitution that self-interested people are taking advantage of now.  The result is that America does not work the way the Founding Fathers intended it, because we’ve become a corporate aristocracy.  The Founding Fathers spent eight years waging a war against invisible decision-making forces that ruled their lives and that they had no control over, and what do we have now but a bunch of new invisible decision-making forces that rule our lives and that we have no control over?

The Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment to give Americans the right to keep and maintain firearms to defend themselves, their families, and their property against thieves and corrupt governments.  But there is no bullet that can kill a corporation.  If you walked into a corporation’s shareholder’s meeting with an Uzi and mowed every last one of them down, the corporation would still exist.  All the people who made the corporation function would be dead, but the corporation would survive.  More people would come along and take the places of the old shareholders and executives and would pick up right where they left off.
It is true that people make the decisions for corporations.  Hypothetically, those people can make any decisions they want.  But the goal of a corporation is not to serve humanity; the goal of a corporation is to make a profit.  If the corporation makes a profit, it succeeds.  If it doesn’t make a profit, it fails, by the very definition of “corporation”.

Since a corporation is an entity that possesses more rights than a person, and it functions by the collective input of different people, there is no real-life person who can possibly oversee all of the actions of the corporation.  That’s especially true in the case of multinational mega-corporations, which work by the collective input of a whole lot of different people.  The result of each person performing their stated job can only be expected to be that the corporation makes as much profit as possible—which is the goal of the corporation in the first place—regardless of what any individual feels the artificial entity should do.

Since the corporation’s goal is defined as the making of profit, naturally all the rules that govern the corporation are written for the sake of the achievement of that goal.  It could be assumed that everyone in the corporation meant well, but then the people who wrote the rules for the corporation would be making the same mistakes the Founding Fathers did.  If each person performs their stated job, under the rules that were written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, what you end up with is an artificial entity that makes as much profit as possible—not one that serves humanity.

Within the corporation’s rules that are written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, there are rules governing what people can do, or are supposed to do, if the corporation isn’t making as much profit as possible.  So once again, if the self-interested, not-inherently-good-after-all people who make the decisions for the corporation each act according to what they perceive to be the most effective means available to them—namely, doing their jobs, as opposed to not doing them—what you end up with is, once again, an independent entity that acts to make as much profit as possible.

The rights of citizens are protected by governments, not by corporations.  Environmental laws are enforced by governments, not by corporations.  Any law that limits that activity of a corporation is an obstacle to the artificial entity making as much profit as possible, by definition.

This means that anyone who works for a corporation and acts in a way that protects citizens’ rights and the environment is not doing so because of anything that exists within the corporation, but because of the external threat posed by the government.  Since the goal of the corporation is to make as much profit as possible and the external laws of the government are an impediment to that, for each person to perform their job and make as much profit as possible for the corporation puts them into conflict with the law.  The laws that limit a corporation’s actions don’t exist to facilitate the corporation’s service to humanity, by definition.  Well as we all know, anyone’s goal in a conflict is to win the conflict, not to cooperate with your opponent.  So corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the needs of their people are continuously pitted against each other, by definition.

And now multi-national corporations are moving capital across international borders ever more efficiently, and thereby dissolving the power of governments, but the borders aren’t being opened to let the workers who sell their labor move freely across the borders.  So in the endless struggle between corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the interests of their people, who’s winning?

Evolution is defined as the adaptation to environmental pressures.  Genetic evolution, technological evolution, and social evolution all work by adaptation to environmental pressure.  Genetic evolution is always governed by ever-greater energy efficiency within the organism’s living conditions.  That ever-greater efficiency results in ever-more-effective preservation of the organism’s DNA, simply because the equipment the organism uses to preserve the survival of his DNA requires energy to operate.  I’ve said all this before.

Traditionally, technological evolution has always moved in the direction of ever-greater personal energy efficiency.  Ever-greater personal energy efficiency naturally seems to us to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA, and traditionally, it has been.  But ever-more-efficient use of personal energy through the development of technology has always depended on ever-greater use of environmental energy.  Using ever-more-advanced technology requires us to make ever more chemical reactions happen.  And thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, that always means more energy radiating off the Earth and being lost to our planetary environment forever.

Now that we’re moving from our species’ colonization phase to its sustainability phase, the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA is no longer synonymous with personal energy efficiency.  But we still naturally perceive it to be.  Now the most effective means for us to preserve the survival of our DNA is to use our environmental energy ever more efficiently.  That necessarily means depending on environmental energy ever less.  And that necessarily means making the transition back to a localized organic agricultural economy.

Social evolution is basically a form of technological evolution, with the one difference being that the “technology” is invisible, because it’s an agreement or other type of collective behavior among a group of people.  But it follows the same pattern of ever-greater personal energy efficiency leading to ever-more-effective preservation of people’s DNA.  But that still only applies to life in the colonization phase of our species, which is where our perceptions of the world evolved.  Now that we’re moving into our species’ sustainability phase, the ever-greater preservation of our DNA necessarily means ever less dependence on environmental energy.  And that means ever-greater use of personal energy.  But once again, making this transition depends on educating people to make them perceive the new discrepancy between personal energy efficiency and the effective preservation of their DNA.

Human behavior itself is a constant adaptation to environmental pressures.  Every decision you ever make in your life you make for the sake of preserving the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you.  As your situation changes, your perception of your situation changes—that is, provided you’re perceiving the situation correctly.  And as your perception of the situation changes, your perception of the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA in that situation also changes.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the laws governing the operation of corporations, they lived in different conditions than we do. First of all, they still seemed to have an infinite supply of material resources available, because they didn’t anticipate the effects of exponential population growth or industrialization.  Back when they wrote the Constitution, they were still living in our species’ colonization phase, which meant that ever greater personal energy efficiency was still synonymous with ever more effective means for people to preserve the survival of their DNA.  Also, they perceived the operation of the world itself differently than we do now—namely, incorrectly—because they lacked the science we have now.

So here’s what all that means for corporations:  When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing the operation of corporations, they wrote them according to their living conditions at the time and their faulty understanding of how the world worked.  Part of the Founding Fathers’ living conditions, which created part of their understanding of how the world worked, was how people acted at the time.  In the late 18th century, everyone who owned a corporation also had Christian values and various other background values.  These values affected their decision-making, which limited them to making certain choices.  But those values were external to both the structure of a corporation and the political system the Founding Fathers founded.  Quite simply, there were certain things people could do that the Founding Fathers had no way of outlawing, because nobody had thought of doing those things yet.  People who own corporations today, however, have different cultural values and 200 more years of practice at cheating and finding loopholes in the laws the Founding Fathers wrote.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing corporations, they created an environmental pressure by creating an agreement among people.  Now, as people adapt to the environmental pressure the Founding Fathers created based on their faulty understanding of the world and their living conditions at the time, when people who work for corporations adapt their behavior to their environmental pressures (meaning act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by doing their jobs according to the laws that govern corporations), they are not acting in ways that are compatible with the world we actually live in.

And here’s why:  Corporations are a vehicle of Capitalism.  The making of “profit” means the control of an increased amount of energy and material resources.  That means that the success of a corporation, and Capitalism itself, depends on sustained economic growth.  But sustained economic growth isn’t sustainable on a finite-sized planet.  Endless economic growth would depend on an infinite supply of resources, and it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of resource to exist.  When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they assumed that the world’s resources were infinite, and they were wrong.  So when they laid the foundation for an economic system they thought would serve people well, it turned out not to work nearly as well as they thought it would.

Then the Founding Fathers went so far as to write laws for creating independent entities that would serve as vehicles for their imaginary economic system.  And then they imbued those independent entities with more rights than people had.

Since our economic system was founded on beliefs about the world that were faulty in a number of ways, the vehicles of that economic system can’t possibly function in a way that’s consistent with physical reality.  The survival of these vehicles—these artificial non-human entities—depends on an infinite supply of resources that can’t physically exist, because one way or another making profits always depends on combining matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, by definition.  If these artificial entities cease to generate profits, they cease to fulfill their purpose for existing.  That makes them failures, by definition.  That creates a new environmental pressure for the people who each make part of the decisions that make the artificial entity function.  Now the most effective means for them to preserve the survival of their DNA is to operate the bureaucratic apparatus that was built into the artificial entity to be used in the event that the artificial entity ceased to make a profit, to make it start generating profit again.

But feeding resources into the artificial entity simply for the sake of keeping it alive necessarily means taking those resources either from the environment or from people—neither of which we can afford any longer.  That necessarily pits the survival of the corporation against the survival of the people who need the resources.  That causes two big problems:

First of all, processing the resources through the corporate machinery just to keep the corporation alive, and then selling them back to the people, would add additional chemical reactions to the process— additional steps to the food chain, in other words, or you could say trickle-through economics.  The Laws of Thermodynamics will make energy radiate off the Earth forever at every step of the way.  Adding in more steps just to keep the artificial entity alive leaves less resources for the real-life people to use.

Second, as I’ve said before, if you put the control of resources that people need to live in the hands of someone else, then for all intents and purposes you’re turned the people who need those resources into slaves.  The person who controls the resources may or may not use them to force the people who need them into slavery.  But if a lot of people are put in control of resources that other people need to live, it is inevitable that some people will use their control of the resources to manipulate the people who need them.  In addition, the very act of putting someone in control of the resources other people need to live creates the master-slave relationship, and the people who are being turned into slaves can be expected to fight back, regardless of whether the master-figure tried to use them as slaves or even intended to use them as slaves.
The Founding Fathers created a monster.  And the Capitalists are choosing to serve it.

Corporations as they exist now are a relic left over from our species’ colonization phase.  As we move into our sustainability phase we will move into a new environmental economy, by definition.  That new environmental economy will create a new human economy.  That new human economy will necessarily create a new political system.

Corporations in their current form can be considered as nothing other than artificial life forms that prey on humans.  They must be exterminated.

It could be said that the people who operate corporations could choose to operate them differently now.  There are four components involved here:  the environmental economy, the Homo sapiens who operate the corporations, those people’s perception of the world, and the laws that govern the operation of the corporations.

The environmental economy of the world is non-negotiable.  The laws of physics are merciless and remorseless.  There is nothing we can change about the environmental economy that will make corporations function differently.

The Homo sapiens who control the corporations are a constant.  They will always act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  That fundamental law of human behavior can’t be changed to make corporations function differently.

The people who control the corporations could be educated in how the world works, how the global environment is changing, and how people will have to start acting differently to live within the physical limitations of the world.

And of course, the laws governing the operation of corporations could be rewritten.

It could be said that all people need to do is to educate the people who operate the corporations to make them perceive the world correctly.  That would change one environmental pressure, that necessarily would change the behavior of the people who make the decisions for the corporation, and that would change the actions of the corporation itself.  This is how Frank Robinson wrote his own set of standards—voluntarily—for how pilots would be certified to fly his helicopters.  Mr. Friedman’s book is full of examples of people who operate corporations doing this also.

The problems with depending exclusively on people who make decisions for corporations to control their own behavior voluntarily, is that if they’re controlling their behavior voluntarily, they still control how they behave.  If they can choose to act in a way that benefits humanity and there’s nothing else in the situation that affects them, then they can still choose not to benefit humanity, just as easily.

The man-made laws that govern the operation of corporations are another environmental pressure.  This one is controlled by the people that a valid government serves.  That government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to protect their mutual interests from those who would threaten them.  Since the goals of a corporation contradict the goals of government (which is why governmental laws limit corporate behavior instead of facilitate it—or at least, are supposed to), to the people a government protects, a corporation is a threat.  So by the people changing the laws that govern the operation of a corporation, the people would be creating a second environmental pressure.

You could just as easily call the federal government the People’s Corporation.  The People’s Corporation defines its economy as the entire global environment, including the entire realm of human behavior.  It defines its economic success by its maintenance of the well being of society.   That means that the People’s Corporation is competition to all other corporations.  And as every Capitalist knows, competition is good for the economy because it drives innovation.  So innovate motherf*cker, innovate!

It could be said that people who control corporations could change the goals of their corporations to suit the needs of the changing environmental economy.  And hypothetically that’s possible.  There’s just one catch.  In order for a corporation to serve people’s needs in the new environmental economy, its owners would have to redefine their economy to include the global environment itself, including the entire realm of human behavior and the effects of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  They would have to redefine economic success by making society function better than it does now.  That would necessarily mean taking action to make empirical improvements on people’s ability to preserve the survival of their DNA. And that would necessarily mean taking specific and decisive action to help make our transition to a global localized organic agricultural economy.

So here’s the catch:  If you do all that to your corporation, you’ll no longer be practicing Capitalism.  You’ll be practicing a Use-Value economic system.  Capitalists define their economic success by their ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, according to the laws of supply and demand.  We define our economic success by our ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people according to the physical limitations of the Earth.  Then we define our personal demand accordingly.  Capitalists measure their economic success by having more.  We measure our economic success by needing less.  The entire global environment is useful to people just the way it is.  In fact, if we had less of a human economy and more of a global environment, the global environment probably would be even more useful to us.  But people don’t naturally perceive that.  We’ve learned  to perceive it.  Capitalists combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by extracting resources from the environment.  We combine matter and energy to turn thing that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by moving things around in our own brains, to make our brains more useful to us, by making ourselves perceive the importance of not extracting resources from the global environment.

And like everything else I talk about in this chapter, all this is elementary to Globalization 4.0.
Geez, and you thought we were just a bunch of Anarchists kicking and screaming and complaining that the world ain’t fair?

Pathetic.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Labor unions are supposed to be the same basic thing a government is, applied to a specific situation.  That is, an agreement among workers to join together to protect their mutual interests against those who would threaten them—namely, their employers.

Labor unions create competition between workers and employers.  And as we all know, Capitalism works so well as an economic system because competition drives innovation.  Gee, so I wonder why so many Capitalists work so hard to prevent their workers from forming unions, and to break up unions that their workers form?  Since every red-blooded Capitalist knows how much Capitalism benefits from competition, you’d think they would encourage their workers to unionize.  Instead, they consistently act as the though their goal in the competition was to win the competition and eliminate their competitors.  Gosh, that’s turning into such a recurring theme.  I wonder why Capitalism doesn’t work as well as everyone thought it would…

Anyway, most labor unions are a joke.  There are a number of reasons for that.  For one, they have professional union organizers.  For another, companies the unions work for have professional union liaisons.

The problem with that is that if the union organizer doesn’t have the same job as the workers, he obviously doesn’t have the same goals as the workers, and therefore, he can’t adequately represent them.  A professional union organizer is paid from the workers’ union dues.  That means that the most effective means a professional union organizer can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA is to get the workers to keep paying their dues.  The most effective means a worker can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA is to work at his job and pay his dues in the hopes that his union will actually do something.

That might not seem like much of a discrepancy.  It could be argued that a professional union organizer has more time to devote to organizing and that he keeps his job and keeps getting paid from the workers’ dues by actually accomplishing what the workers want him to accomplish.
However, as a lot of workers have discovered, professional union organizers end up occupying a different tier of the social hierarchy from the workers they’re supposed to be representing.  Since they don’t work in the conditions of the workers, the workers’ problems are not personally meaningful to them.  So professional union organizers have more time to organize, but union organizers who work alongside the rest of the workers fight a lot harder for the workers’ cause.  So what do professional union organizers do with all that extra time they have to organize?  Well as it turns out, basically, nothing.  And people who make their livings on the sweat and blood of the workers and who don’t actually contribute anything useful to anyone else is exactly what the workers formed their union to protect themselves from in the first place!

That brings me to the problem of company-employed union liaisons.  The goal of the company-employed union liaison is to facilitate relations between the company and the union.  Well there’s just one problem with that.  If you facilitate your relations with another group of people, you’re no longer competing  against them.

So now you have professional union organizers for whom the struggles of the workers are not personally meaningful, working with a company-employed union representative to facilitate the relations between the company and the labor union.  At this point, you’ve completely defeated the whole purpose for having a labor union in the first place!

The professional union organizer’s goal is to preserve the survival of his DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him.  On one side he has a labor union.  On the other side he has a company-employed union liaison.  He gets paid from the workers’ union dues.  So what do you think will be the most effective means he can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA?  He’s going to defend the workers just enough to make them feel like the union is doing something for them, so they will feel like continuing to pay their union dues.  Then he’s going to get together with the company liaison to facilitate the relations between the company and the workers’ union.  That means that the professional union organizer and the company-employed union liaison are going to get together and agree on a bunch of stuff.  Those agreements are always going to benefit the company, because that’s the only thing a company employee would ever agree to.  But people who come to agreements are not competing against each other.  So now the professional union organizer has done enough to make the workers feel like there’s a point to belonging to the union and paying their union dues to support the professional union organizer, and the professional union organizer has come to an agreement with the company-employed union liaison.  The end result of that is that the professional union organizer doesn’t have to struggle against anything, so he doesn’t have to organize any struggle, so he makes his own life as simple as possible, and keeps getting paid from the workers’ union dues.

This experiment has been conducted numerous times by numerous people.

Enter the Industrial Workers of the World.

The Industrial Workers of the World are Anarchists.  They don’t pay professional union organizers, and they don’t work with union liaisons.  They do what labor unions are supposed to do, which is to compete against their employers.

Their goal in the competition is very simple: Destroy Capitalism.  Hey, all you Capitalists out there, this competitive economic system was your idea.  So don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourselves now.  Innovate motherf*cker, innovate.

Of course, innovating is what the Capitalists have been doing all along.  And how have they been innovating?  The same way they always innovate, of course.  And is that by encouraging the competition that drives their economy?  No, it’s by finding ever more efficient and productive ways to win the competition by eliminating their competitors.  In this case, that means breaking up labor unions, preventing workers from forming labor unions, and commandeering the idea of the labor union, appearing to agree with it, stripping it of its content, and selling a hollow replica of it back to the workers to make them feel like they have a labor union on their side.  So if Capitalists are working so hard to destroy labor unions, how else did you expect a labor union to compete against that but to try to destroy Capitalism?

The IWW’s mission statement begins with one very unambiguous sentence:  Labor has nothing in common with Capital.

(Technically they’re mistaken, because Labor and Capital are both Homo sapiens, which is a lot for any two groups of people to have in common.  Their perceptions of the world are different because of their differences in abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.  My dad alternated several times between working for someone else and going into business for himself, which meant he was alternating between being Labor and Capital, but he didn’t turn into a different person each time, and he certainly didn’t become a member of a different species.  But if you take the statement to mean “Labor and Capital tend to have different characteristics that have nothing to do with each other”, as opposed to a literal division of everyone into one group or another, then the statement is true.  And from a literary and artistic standpoint, it makes a very unambiguous opening line.)

Another of the IWW’s founding principles is: Labor is entitled to all it produces.  Think about it.  Why should people spend their lives creating things they aren’t allowed to use?
The argument against that is:  Not allowed to use in what sense?  There’s no law against people buying the things they produce.

There isn’t a formal law against people buying things they produce.  But if the people aren’t paid enough to buy the things they produce, what else do you call that beside not being allowed to use something?  Because their only alternative would be to steal it, and that is against the law.  This commodification of people’s time is precisely where Capitalism began.

I think people have heard enough about what labor unions are supposed to do that I don’t need to spell it out any further.  The Industrial Workers of the World have a website and a newspaper where you can find out more, if you’re interested.  Since an industrialized technological level isn’t environmentally sustainable, the IWW isn’t a solution to all the world’s problems, but it is at least a step in the right direction.  The chemical reaction of the global environment can’t possibly work in a way that can keep everyone alive as long as we don’t have a more equitable economic system, and a more equitable economic system is exactly what the IWW is struggling toward.  Although that equitable economic system can’t be an industrialized economic system, doing something is better than doing nothing.  People who have no control over their futures are slaves, and slavery is an oppressive and inequitable economic system by definition.  Since all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, anyone who makes decisions that affect people who have no control over their futures can’t be trusted not to make their decisions for their own benefit, and at the other person’s expense.  So the IWW is struggling to give workers more control over their futures.  Basically, it’s the No Borders movement applied to all aspects of workers’ lives.

There are a couple other evolutionary factors the IWW has discovered and are putting to good use to make labor unions function the way they’re intended to function, which is what makes the IWW such a good example.

First of all, they’ve discovered the Hobbesian cycle of aggression.  Economic and political power are meaningless unless you use them against the enemy.  If you have them but don’t use them, the enemy will continue to act to advance his interests at the expense of yours, which negates your economic and political power.  So to prevent that from happening, you have to use your economic and political power to push your enemy back and advance your interests, just to make sure he remembers that you can.  You don’t necessarily have to harm his interests in the process of benefiting yours, but if his interests are mutually exclusive of yours, harming his interests is unavoidable.

They tell stories about these things on their website and in their newspaper all the time.  A lot of their actions are pretty straightforward—striking and picketing and things like that.  But they also use their worker solidarity in simpler ways, for more day-to-day purposes.

One story that sticks in my mind is of a Wiccan lady who worked at a Starbuck’s getting in trouble for wearing her Pentacle openly.  Her manager told her to take it off for all the usual reasons employers tell their employees to take off their Pentacles—mainly because they offend a lot of customers.  But then those same managers don’t say anything to employees who wear crosses openly, because if they did, they’d piss off about 70% of Americans or something like that.  So people’s rights to observe their religions are being governed according the effects they’re having on Capitalists’ profits.

The Wiccan lady wouldn’t back down and refused to take off her Pentacle.  So her manager sent her home a couple of times.  Then the Wiccan brought up the problem at her next IWW meeting, and she and her Fellow Workers came up with a plan.

The next time the Wiccan’s manager told her to take off her Pentacle, she refused again.  So the manager sent her home again.  But this time the Wiccan took off her Pentacle and handed it to one of her Fellow Workers, and he put it on.  So then the manager backed down, because she couldn’t afford to send him home too.  That was the last time she told the Wiccan to take off her Pentacle.

With that simple of an act of workers cooperating to protect themselves against their Capitalist employers, the Capitalists were forced to yield, and the workers won.  As we all know, Capitalism is a competitive economic system, and competition drives innovation.  Innovation is not the goal of Capitalist competition; the goal of Capitalist competition is to defeat the opposition.

Innovation is just the byproduct, so it does nothing to change the fact that Capitalism is inherently oppressive.  The easiest way to win at competitions is to compete against people you know you can beat.  And that’s exactly what this manager was doing.  But then the workers innovated and found a more effective and more productive way to compete against the Capitalists.  And the workers won.

The other big evolutionary factor IWW members are putting to use doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but it has monumental effects on people’s perceptions of their situation.  You know how people use titles like Doctor or Senator or Admiral to address people who have accomplished something important in life?  Within the IWW, everyone addresses each other as Fellow Worker.  In print, the title is always capitalized.  Because really, everyone who works for a living, or even tries to work for a living, is accomplishing something important in life.

This is just the Australian mate tradition applied specifically to an economic system.  It’s similar to the Communist tradition of addressing each other as Comrade, and the tradition a few American presidents have used of addressing voters as My Fellow Americans, but it’s different in two important ways.

Like the Australian mate tradition, the Fellow Worker title calls a social status truce.  That means any time one IWW member addresses another, with the first two words out of their mouth they’ve called a social status truce—which means that IWW members can’t talk to each other without calling a social status truce.  Where Australians use their social status truce tradition with anyone, IWW members use it for people who play a specific role in an economic system.  If you don’t play that role, they don’t offer you the truce, because they already know that your goals are mutually exclusive to theirs.

After the words Fellow Worker leave your mouth, you will hold yourself responsible for living up to your own ideals with your own actions.  If you address someone as Fellow Worker and then don’t treat him like an equal, it’s going to be obvious that you were lying when you addressed him as Fellow Worker.  So if he doesn’t cooperate with you, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.

At the same time, if you address him as Fellow Worker and he doesn’t treat you like an equal, that will make it obvious that he’s not interested in a social status truce, so he’s absolved you of cooperating with him.  You began the conversation by attempting to call a social status truce with him, and he chose not to accept it, which means that he chose to free you from any obligation you might’ve felt to act in his interests.

The Fellow Worker title is different from the Comrade or Fellow American titles because it doesn’t imply that the other person should feel any emotional attachment to you as a result of belonging to the same group as you.  Consequently, you won’t evoke that feeling from the other person.  It is true that an IWW member might try to use the words that way, but if they do it will be less effective, because the words themselves don’t imply that meaning.

Calling someone your Comrade implies that he already belongs to some group with you, and therefore he should cooperate with you for that reason alone.  Calling someone Fellow American is a direct reference to the group the two of you belong to, and just as with the Comrade title it carries with it the implication that you should cooperate with each other just because you’re members of the same group.

The Fellow Workers title is a title of respect that refers to the fact that the other person is trying to make a living just like you are.  It also refers to the fact that as two workers, the two of you have a lot of interests in common.  But it does all of this in a way that leaves the two of you as independent entities, who can each choose to cooperate with the other or not to cooperate with each other as you see fit.  It is fairly likely that you will choose to cooperate with each other, but if you do make that choice, you will make it as a result of the situation that affects you.  And as a result, that cooperation doesn’t need to be enforced upon either of you artificially.

The other big difference between the Fellow Workers and the Fellow Americans and Comrade titles is that the Fellow Americans and Comrade titles were used by people who practiced coercive governments.  If your president addresses you as “My Fellow Americans” or “Comrades”, he is trying to get you to attach emotional meaning to your membership in a group that he has the power to force you to cooperate with.   That renders both of those terms basically meaningless, because everyone who hears them knows they’re lies.  If the other person attempts to invoke your loyalty to a group when he addresses you, but you know, and he knows, and you know that he knows, that you have no choice but to belong to that group, and that he has the ability to punish you if you don’t cooperate with the group, then you know that he isn’t really addressing you that way because he needs to.  The only reason he’s addressing you that way is to save himself the trouble of punishing you.  So why should you think of him as anything other than a politician who’s trying to maintain a good public image and who doesn’t really give a f*ck about you?

Since the Industrial Workers of the World are Anarchists, nobody wields any power over anyone else.  Or even if they do, as a result of a majority of workers electing certain people to be the representatives of their local chapter or whatever, it is still the goal of Anarchism that no one should wield any power over anyone else.  So first of all, whatever power anyone wields over anyone else is minimized.  Then, if you do wield power over someone else and choose to wield it for your benefit at their expense, you prove yourself not to be an Anarchist, and therefore not qualified for your position.  Whatever amount of power you wield over anyone else is going to be less than the amount of power all the other group member working together will wield over you.  And if you prove yourself not to be an Anarchist, you can be sure that the other group members will wield that power against you.  So regardless of any superficial inequalities in decision-making power that exist within the group, the simple fact that all the members of the group have agreed to define the success of the group by the mutual benefit of all the members in the group, renders those discrepancies in decision-making power meaningless.

By contrast, here in America, we have a competitive economy and inevitably that competition has spilled over into what was originally intended to be a cooperative political system in which civilized men would resolve their disagreements without resorting to bloodshed.  Now our political system has become a competitive political system where two sides battle each other every other year for who gets to make the economy work the way they want it to work.  And that necessarily means which of two scientifically invalid economic ideologies our politicians are going to put into practice.  If you participate willingly in the American political system as it stands now, you are no longer agreeing to participate in a cooperative political system.  Now you’re agreeing to take your chances on winning the elections, along with everyone else.  If you win, you win the right to force the losing side to cooperate with you at gunpoint.  And you agree that if you lose, the other side has the right to force you to cooperate with them at gunpoint.

IWW members don’t recognize national boundaries as legitimate obstacles to control the movement of workers looking for work.  I’ve talked about this already.  Now when you add in the Fellow Worker title, it takes that idea to a whole new level.  If an American IWW member talks about Mexican IWW members, he refers to them as Fellow Workers.  If those Mexican IWW members then cross the U.S. border looking for work, he still refers to them as Fellow Workers, as opposed to illegal immigrants.  Even if they take his job, the American IWW member still refers to them as Fellow Workers.  That is, he actively recognizes them as workers trying to earn a living, just like he’s doing.  The fact that they crossed the border illegally doesn’t make them illegal immigrants—meaning “bad people”—it just makes them workers who crossed the border illegally to look for work.  Another person’s belief of who should be allowed to work where has no effect on the respect the IWW member holds for other workers.  So in this way, the Fellow Worker title directly counteracts the illegal immigrant label.

The goal of the IWW, and Anarcho-Socialists in general, is for labor unions to take over the companies, so that the workers can control their working conditions directly, without having to go through their Capitalist employers.  Hey, we all live in a Capitalist economy, where competition is rewarded.  So what else do you call the IWW trying to take over all the companies in the world but competition?  If you suddenly don’t like the idea of competition so much anymore, all I can say to that is, innovate motherf*cker, innovate.

Dr. McNally has quite a bit to say about the importance of labor unions to the anti-Capitalist revolution, all of which either applies to the IWW, or could be added to what they’re already doing easily.  Of course, any other group of people could do these things too.

First of all, an additional problem that traditional American labor unions suffer from is that of being too conservative.  In general, White men are well represented in traditional unions while women and minorities aren’t.  Traditional unions try to use general business professionalism etiquette.  In various other ways, labor union members try to mimic the culture of their employers in the hopes that their employers will relate well to them, sympathize with them, and be more willing to give them what they want.  In other words, traditional labor unions have the completely counterproductive goal of trying to get ahead in the economic system of the people who are oppressing them.  Here we can see another danger of basing your perception of the world on ancient religious beliefs.  If you believe that people—of your own cultural background at least—are inherently good and are only tempted to commit evil, instead of believing people to be inherently self-interested, you’ll completely underestimate just how evil people of your own cultural background can be.

It is virtually inescapable that defeating Capitalism will depend on a lot of widespread, coordinated labor strikes in America and the rest of the industrialized world.  After all, Capitalism is powered by people working at their jobs.  As long as people keep working at their jobs, Capitalism survives, because the Capitalists keep making their profits.

One good place some people in Los Angeles found to recruit for labor unions was on city buses.  City buses in L.A. are constantly being ridden by factory workers, housekeepers, landscapers, construction workers, and all kinds of other people with low-paying jobs who the economy depends upon.  The Bus Riders’ Union is a broad-based labor union, which isn’t specific to any industry, and which brings together a lot of people who have the same basic interests.  The organizers of the BRU started with the most obvious:  the condition of the buses.  At the time the BRU was founded, the L.A. public transportation commission was spending a hugely disproportional amount of its budget on the light rail system that ran through a few upper class neighborhoods—it was public transportation racism.  So they got a lot of bus riders to help make a lot of noise about that, and the problem was solved.  Another common interest of the Bus Riders Union was coming out in support of the bus drivers’ union when they went on strike for higher wages.  From there, the founders of the BRU showed a lot of workers just how much they could do if they worked together, and got a lot of workers used to the idea of being able to make things happen.

Another way people in numerous cities have found to build broad-based worker’s political movements is to set up labor union centers in lower class neighborhoods, where people with some experience in organization can set up a basic structure of support for workers.  Setting up labor unions in working-class neighborhoods, as opposed to at places of employment, gives workers the opportunity to come join a union without their employers knowing about it.  But the real strength of this strategy is that by giving workers a place to come learn how labor unions work and what they can accomplish, these workers have the opportunity to meet up with each other.  From that and from learning the basic background of how labor unions work and what they can accomplish, they can build upon that to figure out how to work together to solve problems they face on their own.  And because these unions aren’t being founded by occupation but by neighborhood (where a lot of people in the same occupations live anyway), the workers aren’t limited to working together to solve problems they face at their jobs, but can work together to solve problems they face in any aspect of their lives.  So it’s not so much a labor union as it is a labor movement.

As you may have noticed, these basic approaches to setting up broad-based workers’ movements doesn’t result in labor unions dominated by White men, but in labor movements everyone gets to be a part of.  Then you really do pit Labor against Capital.  Otherwise, all you end up with is Labor trying to imitate Capital.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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I’m sure just about everyone in America has seen the video of Rodney King getting beaten by the police.  Oh, wait, that was like, 15 years ago or something.  Never mind…

I’m sure a few people in America have seen the video of Rodney King getting beaten by the police.  So guess what arose out of that but a movement of citizens who patrol the streets with video cameras, keeping their eyes out for anyone being confronted by the police.

Cop Watch is basically a citizens’ vigilante group that polices the police.  They make their own uniforms and go out patrolling the streets with video cameras to make sure the police don’t forget that they’re being watched.  (In the same basic way that the IWW strikes every once in a while just to make sure their employers don’t forget they’re dealing with a labor union.)  Some Cop Watch volunteers also carry video cameras around with them whenever they go out, in case they see any cops confronting anyone.  They also hand out information about what to do when you’re confronted by police, they maintain websites with information and links, and they hold teach-ins, show documentary movies, hold public protests, and all the usual things activists do.

In the first book I talked about how police brutality is an inevitable result of cops being stuck on the front lines of an inequitable economic system.  On one side is group of people who value profits over all else, and then leave it up to the cops to clean up the messes they make and otherwise defend their inequitable economy.  On the other side are people who are trying to make it in an economic system run by materially wealthy people who don’t give a f*ck about them, and who resort to breaking the law to try to get ahead.  When the cops get desperate to try to enforce laws nobody wants to follow, they resort to the reputation part of the Hobbesian cycle of aggression and try to beat people into submission to make them not dare to break the law.

In the second book I showed you how our inequitable economy colliding with the physical limitations of the world is going to make more and more police brutality inevitable.  In a world with an increasing population and diminishing resources, in order for the materially rich to stay rich, the materially poor are going to have to become increasingly poor.  But that means the police are going to have to fight harder and harder to get everyone to obey the law.  And in the end it won’t do anyone any good; it’s just another symptom of our suicidal economy.

It could be argued that the Capitalists might one day hire so many police that they won’t have any trouble enforcing the law, without resorting to police brutality.  That isn’t likely, because sometime before that they’re going to reach a point where the number of police they’ve hired has reduced police brutality to a level that the public finds acceptable.  At that point the laws will be enforced adequately in practice, even though the result won’t be brought about perfectly legally.  The Capitalists will do this because that will be the balancing point among number of police hired, public acceptance, and practical enforcement of the law that will yield the most profits.  Police brutality will then be a component of the Capitalists’ law enforcement system, in the same way that 4,000 Mexicans dying in the desert trying to sneak around the walls is a part of the Capitalists’ anti-immigration policy.

But for the sake of argument, let’s just say that happens anyway, that the Capitalists hire enough police to make police brutality completely unnecessary.  Whether it’s legalized or not, the fact remains that an increasingly inequitable economy can only be maintained by an increasing amount of coercive force.  On our present course, in 20 years from now, whatever amount of coercive force the police will be using will be greater than what it is now.  That might not legally qualify as police brutality then, but compared to what we have now it will be police brutality, regardless of what it’s called.

Now in this book I’ll raise the stakes in the police brutality controversy even further.  As I’ve shown you already in this chapter, right now some people who are struggling against our political and economic systems are being labeled terrorists, some are being labeled traitors, and some are being labeled illegal immigrants.  Those negative terms are being used intentionally to make the public think those are all bad people and to get the public not to care what happens to them.

Now what effect do you suppose those labels have on police?

And what effect do you suppose those labels have on the public’s perception of how the police treat those people?

If the police hear people referring to other people as terrorists or illegal immigrants, how do you think that’s going to affect the way they’re going to treat those people if they confront them?  And how much do you think the public is going to care how the police treat those people?  If the police catch terrorists or illegal immigrants, why shouldn’t they beat them up?  They are bad people after all.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be called terrorists or illegal immigrants, would they?  And if the police realize that the public doesn’t care about people who are called terrorists or illegal immigrants getting beaten up, they won’t have to worry about the public complaining very much, will they?

Now what do you suppose would happen if those labels were attached to people by politically powerful and materially wealthy people the police looked up to?

And what do you suppose would happen if those labels were attached to people by the police’s own leaders?

If the police, through their own life experience, through the labeling of people by political and social leaders, or through the labeling of people by their own leaders, perceive certain people to be bad, they necessarily perceive those people to be less human than themselves.  If the people were equal to the police, they would be smart enough to obey the law, wouldn’t they?  If the police also perceive that the public perceives that a certain group of people are bad, then the police perceive that the public also perceives the people to be less human than themselves.  So as far as the police and the public are concerned, the social consequence for beating up one of these inferior people is less than the social consequence of one of their own getting beaten up.

You already know how Capitalists are using negative terms to refer to people who oppose them.  I’ve shown you how police brutality could be used in the future by Capitalists the same way the vast stretches of desert between the walls on the Mexican border are being used, to unofficially help enforce laws in practice, without their having to go to the trouble of enforcing the laws in the conventional way.

So what makes you think they aren’t doing this already?

But don’t take my word for it.  Go to any Cop Watch website and find out for yourself.
The simplest defense against police brutality is obvious:  Don’t break the law.  Don’t speed, don’t drink and drive, don’t shoplift, don’t sell hard drugs, none of that.  If you don’t give the police an excuse to beat you up, you’re off to a good start.

The next best defense against police brutality is for police not to intimidate people unnecessarily.  If, for instance, they’re dealing with a person who comes from a bad part of town where everyone who pushes people around like a thug is a thug, and the police start pushing that person around like thugs, should it be any surprise if the person suddenly feels like he has to fight for his life?  The Cripps and the Bloods wear gang colors, carry guns, push people around, and don’t give a f*ck about your Constitutional rights, your Miranda rights, or your human rights.  If another bunch of people who wear colors and carry guns push people around and don’t seem to give a f*ck about peoples’ Constitutional, Miranda, or human rights, as far as the people on the receiving end of the incident are concerned, that isn’t a police action at all, it’s a showdown with a rival gang.

One night I was out walking around when I saw a Black kid handcuffed and sitting on a curb surrounded by four police.  He’d been pulled over while stopped at a traffic light by a couple police on bicycles.  I didn’t see that part of it, but from everything I heard them talking about, after they flashed their lights, he tried to pull away.  He said that he was trying to get out of the street and pull over to the side of the road like people are supposed to do when they get pulled over by the police.

The police said that people in cars who get pulled over by bicycle police drive off all the time, and there’s no way police on bicycles can catch a car that tries to get away from them.  After they flashed their lights, one of the officers walked up on each side of the car and demanded the idents from the driver and the passenger.  The driver didn’t hand his over (because, as he said, he wanted to pull off to the side of the road first), so the officer demanded it again, threatened to drag him out of the car, and then did drag him out of the car, in very rapid succession, from what I heard.

I think they were both full of sh*t.  First of all, when the officer demanded the kid’s ident, the kid tried to roll up his window.  If that wasn’t a dead giveaway of somebody not intending to cooperate with the police, I don’t know what is.  But on the other hand, the police said they stopped him for playing his stereo too loud in the middle of a commercial district on a Saturday night.  Would they have been so quick to pull over a couple of well-groomed White kids in a more expensive car for something so trivial?   If the kids looked like their parents had good lawyers, would the police have bothered?  Or were they just making a routine stop to try to catch DUIs?  The kid looked drunk and he did get stopped, so were the police just doing their jobs fair and square?  That would explain why the kid wanted to get away from them.

On the other hand, if the officer wasn’t just a well-dressed thug throwing his weight around, why would the kid driving off have been a problem?  After he flashed his lights, he would’ve radioed the license plate number into the dispatcher, and by the time he got to the driver’s door, the dispatcher would’ve known where the owner of the car lived.  If the kid drove off, the dispatcher could’ve just radioed all the police cars in the area, and a car could’ve caught him.

One other thing was obvious.  The kid did not trust the police in the least.  Even if their reasons for pulling him over were completely justified, and even if their reasons for confronting him in the way they did was completely justified, it meant absolutely nothing to the kid.  That kid understood only one thing:  that his survival was being threatened.  He put up a lot of reasonable-sounding arguments in very impassioned tones of voice.  Was he trying to reason with the officers because he had no alternative left, and was growing more frustrated because it was getting him nowhere?  Or was it all an act and he wanted to accuse them of brutality just so he could get off his drunk driving charge?  I have no idea, but it doesn’t really matter.  Whatever his reasons for saying the things he said, he was obviously saying them because no matter how slim his chances were of talking his way out of an arrest, he believed that whatever chances he might have after he got arrested would be even worse.

The kid started arguing more and more desperately, and finally got to his feet and started insulting the police and spitting at them.  His hands were cuffed behind his back, but he was putting up a fight the best way he could, because by that point that was the only hope he saw.  It didn’t work of course; three officers wrestled him down and held him face down on the ground.  If he was in trouble before, now he’d added resisting arrest to his charges.

Was it a perfectly legitimate traffic stop in all regards?  Was it police brutality?  Does it matter?  The one constant that existed in any possibility was: the kid felt his survival being threatened in a very profound way, and he had no idea what to do about it.  If it didn’t start out as police brutality, it looked an awful lot like police brutality by the end, because the kid tried every way he knew to protect himself, and he got beaten to the ground for it.  Even if he was a DUI, why would he think that trying to fight off four police officers all by himself with his hands cuffed behind his back was his most promising course of action?

So here’s my ultimate defense against police brutality.  If you’re getting physically assaulted by the police, or feel like you’re in immanent danger of getting assaulted by the police, don’t fight back physically.  Do whatever you can to try to keep from getting hurt, but here’s what you do to fight back instead.

Start chanting, “My name is…” and your name, loud enough so witnesses can hear you.  So if the police seem like they’re about to beat you up, and your name was, for instance, Robert Paulson, you just start chanting, “My name is Robert Paulson!  My name is Robert Paulson!  My name is Robert Paulson!”

That will do four things.  First of all, it will be an alarm to anyone nearby that someone is getting beaten up by the police.  Second, you’ll make sure the people who hear you remember your name.  Third, you’ll be warning the police to back down, unless they’ve got a reason for beating you up that will hold up in court.  And fourth, it will help make the police recognize you as a human being, and (hopefully) will get them to stop beating you up.

If you’re witnessing a police brutality and you can’t think of anything else to do, you can help spread the alarm by joining in the chant.  “His name is Robert Paulson!  His name is Robert Paulson! His name is Robert Paulson!”  But if there are a lot of people around already, you might be better off to keep your mouth shut so everyone can hear what’s going on.  And if you’re chanting and people start showing up, keep your eyes out for anyone with a video camera, so you don’t drown out what the police and suspect are saying.  After all, the video camera is a much better defense than the chant.

If you’re the police and a suspect starts chanting his name, you’d better let him do it, because he is trying to defuse the situation.  He feels threatened by you, and he’s trying to defend himself in a way that’s personally meaningful to him.  It doesn’t matter what rights he has, or even what rights you tell him about.  If those rights aren’t personally meaningful to him, he isn’t going to perceive them to be of any use to him.  If he starts chanting it means he feels threatened, so now he’s fighting back to try to keep himself safe from you without trying to fight you physically.

It’s inevitable that people are going to abuse this idea and start chanting their name to draw a crowd whenever they’re confronted by police, even if they weren’t in any immediate danger of police brutality.  That’s what always happens whenever anyone comes up with a good new idea.  But there are a few factors in the surrounding situation that I think will keep abuse of this idea under control.

First, any witnesses will be able to hear how loud the person is yelling and how much emotional communication he’s using in his voice—meaning how desperate he sounds.  If witnesses come running and don’t find the police trying to beat him up, a lot of them are going to drift away.  Now you’re the little boy who cried wolf.  And if the police start beating you up after all the witnesses have left, that’s your own fault.  So don’t use this defense unless it’s a real emergency.

Second, if people over-use this collectively, everyone’s chant is going to draw fewer witnesses.  That won’t prevent anyone from doing it all by itself, but anyone who’s spreading the idea to other people to try to counter-act police brutality will be sure to tell them.

Third, if the police aren’t threatening the suspect, how likely is it that the suspect is going to start chanting anyway?    That would just make the situation more complicated and drag out the time the suspect had to deal with the police.  Some people will start chanting for no real reason anyway, but a lot of people won’t.  Especially if they realize that when the witnesses show up they’re going to see there’s nothing going on and wander off anyway.

Finally, if people start chanting as soon as the police approach them, you can be sure the police are going to pass some new law against it, or call it obstruction of justice or failure to cooperate with an officer or something.  Then they’re just going to add on more charges.  If you’re about to get beaten up, then anything you try to do could be considered obstruction of justice, so you’ve got nothing to lose at that point.  But if you’re just doing it for the sake of obstructing justice, don’t be surprised if you get charged for it.

It is true that some people will use this in conditions that other people wouldn’t.  It’s also true that some people will use this in conditions where the police don’t think it’s necessary.  But if the person starts chanting, they’re doing it because they feel threatened and they’re trying to keep themselves safe.  Nobody else’s opinion is relevant.  So if the police in some neighborhoods find that every time they approach anyone the people start chanting, maybe that ought to tell you something about how much the people in the neighborhood trust the police.

And that would just be a symptom of a much larger problem.  So that would be a sign that there’s a problem that needs to be solved in that neighborhood.

But don’t worry.  If government officials weren’t willing to solve the problem, I know of a lot of Anarchists would be glad to help solve it.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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The anti-nuclear movement opposes nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.  I’m sure we’ve all heard about that.

As you’ll recall from the Thermodynamics chapter, nuclear power is the least efficient and most environmentally destructive form of energy ever harnessed, simply because turning nuclear energy into a form that’s useful to us involves more steps—meaning more chemical reactions, or a longer food chain—than any other form of energy.  And in the end you have to find some way to dispose of it that will keep it safely contained for something on the order of a quarter of a million years.  Nuclear power just seems powerful because you can concentrate more nuclear power into a smaller space than you can any other form of power—which is what makes atomic bombs so powerful.  But that’s a complete sensory illusion, because when you look at a nuclear power plant you have no way of seeing how much energy had to be burned to build the plant, and how much energy it takes to operate it now.  In terms of calories of energy produced versus calories of energy expended in the production, chopping firewood will always be the most efficient way to harness energy.

Nuclear weapons are the key ingredient that make nuclear war possible, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.  As Albert Einstein once said, “If the only tool you have to work with is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”  He was referring to the way available resources affect your perception of the world, by the way.

I’m sure everyone has heard about these two parts to the anti-nuke movement already.  Now here’s something you probably didn’t know:

First of all, here we are, poised to invade Iran to stop them from building nuclear weapons.  The funny thing about that is, we’re already waging a nuclear war in Iraq.  Yeah, you heard me.
Beginning with the U.S. military involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the U.S. military has been using depleted uranium ammunition.  Depleted uranium makes for heavier projectiles, which makes them penetrate armored vehicles and fortifications more easily.  It’s a great idea at first glance.

Unfortunately, depleted uranium is still radioactive.  A lot of U.S. military personnel who’ve been exposed to a lot of depleted uranium ammunition can’t have children when they come home after the war, or else they have horribly deformed children.

Now here’s the even bigger problem:  Everyone else who is exposed to depleted uranium ammunition is affected in the same way.  And whenever the U.S. military uses depleted uranium ammunition in a country, after the war there’s still a whole bunch of depleted uranium lying all over the place!  So anywhere the U.S. military has fought a large battle using depleted uranium ammo, the whole section of land can be rendered uninhabitable for a quarter of a million years or something like that.  That means no one can live on that land or grow food on it.  Leaving the land to regrow wild doesn’t solve the problem because anything else that lives on the land will be exposed to the radiation also, so you can just imagine what that’s going to mean for the environment there.  And anyone, at any time now or in the future, who unwittingly moves onto the land, or eats food grown out of it, or eats wild animals that lived on it, is going to get radiation poisoning, which is going to destroy their DNA and prevent them from reproducing.

One way to look at it is that everywhere the U.S. military fights a battle with depleted uranium ammunition, that piece of land is being permanently removed from the country’s total land area—the geographical size of the country is being reduced without their borders officially being changed, in other words.  Another way to look at it is that the U.S. military is killing not only the people who fought in the battle itself, but also anyone who comes to the battlefield in the future.
That means depleted uranium weapons kill indiscriminately.  And that makes them weapons of mass destruction.

That means that before we invaded Iraq there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction in the country, but now there are—because we put them there.

Here’s what the Iraq Veterans Against the War have to say about depleted uranium.  Who better to ask than the people who have lived through it, right?  You can find out more about it on their website—and lots of other people’s websites too.

What Is Depleted Uranium?

Depleted Uranium (DU) is a toxic, radioactive, heavy metal that is the waste byproduct of the uranium enrichment process when producing nuclear weapons and uranium for nuclear reactors. Because this radioactive waste is plentiful and 1.7 times more dense than lead, the United States government uses DU in munitions/ammunition which are extremely effective at piercing armored vehicles. However, every round of DU ammunition leaves a residue of DU dust on everything it hits, contaminating the surrounding area with toxic waste that has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the age of our solar system, and turns every battlefield and firing range into a toxic waste site that poisons everyone in such areas. DU dust can be inhaled, ingested or absorbed through scratches in the skin. DU is linked to DNA damage, cancer, birth defects and multiple health problems. The United Nations classifies depleted-uranium ammunition as illegal weapons of mass destruction because of their long-term impacts on the land over which they used and the long-term health problems they cause when people are exposed to them.

How Do I Know If Have Been Exposed to DU?

DU is used throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, mostly in aircraft, tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicle ammunition. You can be exposed to DU by coming into contact with any area that has been fired upon by DU munitions, any equipment that has been exposed to DU dust or anywhere DU dust has settled.

What Are The Symptoms of DU Exposure?

Depleted uranium has two different effects on the body, chemical poisoning and radiation poisoning. Symptoms are similar to those described as Gulf War Syndrome. DU may also cause respiratory problems and is known to elevate the risk of lung cancer and leukemia.

* Chronic Fatigue
* Neurological signs or symptoms
* Signs or symptoms involving upper or lower respiratory system
* Menstrual disorders
* Kidney problems

How Do I get Tested For DU Contamination?

As of now only a few states in the USA care enough to provide soldiers with DU testing. Connecticut and Louisiana have passed such legislation. However, you should keep a detailed set of records on when and where you may have been exposed, report symptoms and information to a physician and get them on record. If they persist, do not be discouraged by military doctors who seem to brush them off.  If you are still on active duty, you should immediately register with DOD by calling 1-800-796-9699. Those who have left active military service should call the Veterans Administration at 1-800-PGW-VETS.

As for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  A lot of people are still debating whether it was right or not.  On the one side, the Japanese did start a war against the United States, and if they lost the war they started, whose fault was that?

On the other side, the Japanese had been trying to surrender for 3 for months, but the United States government didn’t accept it until after they’d dropped the atom bombs.   The Japanese had been offering to surrender on the one condition that they would be allowed to keep their emperor.  The Americans refused.  After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, the Japanese offered to surrender unconditionally.  The Americans accepted it, and let the Japanese keep their emperor.  I must say, that looks suspiciously like the Americans prolonged the war for the extra three months not because they had a problem with the Japanese keeping their emperor after all, but because they wanted guinea pigs for their experiment in dropping atom bombs on cities.
And of course, as we all know, killing civilians to drive a country’s political decision-making through fear is called terrorism.

But regardless of the motivation or intentions of the American politicians, to be fair, let’s consider what happened as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed.

First of all, quite simply, the physicists who built the atom bomb fell into the trap that I am very consciously avoiding and that the rest of the evolutionary psychology movement has fallen into.  That is, those physicists understood how horrific of a weapon they built, but the politicians who made the decision on whether or not to use didn’t.  So some of the greatest scientific minds in the world stretched their abilities to their limits for years in the biggest scientific endeavor that had ever been undertaken in history, and then left their discoveries in the hands of a bunch of stupid monkeys.  Disaster was inevitable.

(That’s why I produce all of my work in terms everyone can understand—or I try to anyway.  If official scientists don’t want to recognize me for my work, oh well, f*ck ‘em.  If that’s the price of preventing my work from being turned into the next atom bomb, I’ll be glad to pay it.)
With the exception of the physicists who built the atom bomb, nobody on Earth had any way of understanding what the atom bomb was or what it could mean for their futures.  People had been building ever more powerful weapons since the dawn of warfare.   So why should anyone suspect this would be any different?   The development of the atom bomb was just like the development of agriculture in a lot of ways—a new development that seemed to people to work better than what they’d been doing before, but no one had any way of knowing how it would turn out.

So American political leaders had no way of comprehending how powerful, and how dangerous, atom bombs were.  Neither did American citizens.  Neither did Soviet political leaders.  Neither did Soviet citizens.

The Americans and the Soviets were using two political systems that were completely incompatible, which meant their goals were mutually exclusive.  That meant that each posed a permanent threat to the other.

Now the Americans had built a huge new type of bomb.  The American political system was a threat to the Soviet political system.  The Soviets knew that their political system was a threat to the American political system, and they knew that the Americans knew that too.  So to keep themselves safe from the Americans, the Soviets had to start building these new super-powerful bombs too.

So my question is:  If two superpowers whose political systems made them mortal enemies had gone into their political conflict both armed with lots of atom bombs and no politicians or citizens on either side had any way of knowing what an atom bomb would do to a city, what do you think would’ve happened?

I think it’s safe to say that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t end World War II so much as they prevented World War III.  (Or at least, they prevented the Americans and the Soviets from fighting it with nuclear weapons.)

So despite the fact that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t make their sacrifices willingly, we owe it to them, more than to anyone else, that World War III wasn’t fought between the Americans and Soviets with nuclear weapons.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Poverty and homelessness are serious problems in America.  In the last book I showed you how Capitalism depends on unemployment.  You might say that unemployment is an inescapable product of a competitive economic system.  But inescapable how, exactly?  Is it because the unemployed are the ones who are losing at the competition?  Or is it because Capital is competing not for the sake of driving innovation but for the sake of eliminating competition, as usual, by forcing Labor to compete against each other so they can’t compete against Capital?  Does our competitive economic system really depend on filthy people pushing shopping carts around town, digging through garbage dumpsters looking for aluminum cans to drive innovation?

But then, finding ever more efficient ways to oppress people is a form of innovation.  See what happens when we build an economic system that depends on some abstract side effect that’s produced by individual people’s collective pursuit of tangible goals?  Should it come as any surprise that the individual people should succeed at what they set out to do?   And should it come as any surprise that the abstract side effect you were hoping for ends up getting overshadowed by the results of the people succeeding at their actual goals?  What the f*ck did you expect?

That brings me to the serious problem of poverty and homelessness in America.  To say that we have a government of, by, and for the people, where some people are left to wander the streets looking for something to eat and somewhere to sleep implies that anyone ever asked those people if they wanted to participate in a competitive economic system.  If you asked any of them, I’m willing to bet they would say no.  I’m willing to bet they would say they’d rather have an economic system where they could have a job.

It is true that a competitive economic system drives innovation.  Homeless people innovate just like everyone else.  They innovate more efficient and productive ways to pick cans out of garbage dumpsters, they innovate more efficient and productive ways to transport their cans and the rest   of their belongings, they innovate more efficient and productive ways to pan handle, and they innovate more efficient and productive ways to build shelters or find park benches to sleep on.  If you ever take a few moments to watch what a homeless person is doing as a person, to try to survive, be safe, feel safe, make friends, be respected, feel good, and use their abilities to make lives for themselves, considering they have virtually no resources to work with, it’s not hard to see that they work for their livings just like everyone else.  I had to leave out having relationships, having sex, having families, and using their abilities as much as possible to make lives for themselves, because when you have barely enough to survive, reproduction and higher levels of survival just fall off your list of priorities.

As for unemployed people who aren’t homeless, they innovate too.  A lot of them innovate ever more efficient and productive ways to cheat the welfare system.  I know I’ve spent a lot of time innovating ever more efficient and productive ways to collect unemployment.  If there aren’t any jobs to apply for that you’d be good at, the unemployment systems in every state I’ve ever had to collect unemployment in basically force you to stay unemployed.  If you take a sh*tty job to try to support yourself while you wait for a better job to come along, you can very well get trapped there.  First you probably aren’t going to have any time to go apply for other jobs, because at all the jobs I work at anyway, the work hours are the same as the hours other employers take job applications, because all the companies have the same hours.  And second, you can only collect unemployment if you get laid off.  If you’re collecting unemployment and you take a sh*tty job to try to support yourself, and then you get fired or you quit after a week, you’re unemployed again and now you can’t collect unemployment.

Food sovereignty is a movement that addresses this basic problem on a large scale.  Everything I just said about homeless people in America also applied to Native Americans being forced into the reservation system, and applies to entire countries around the world now.  Any person, or group of people, who can’t provide enough food for themselves is the slave of whoever they depend on for their food.  For Native American nations that means our federal government.  For countries it means other countries or whoever else is bringing the food into their countries.  For homeless Americans it means the welfare system, the unemployment system, or whoever else they as individuals can get their money from.

Food sovereignty is a challenge and an obstacle to a competitive economic system.  People who are food sovereign are independent.  People who aren’t food sovereign can be controlled.  Food sovereign and independent is exactly what the Mexican subsistence farmers were before they got driven off their land as I’ve told you about in this chapter, and it’s what the farmers in La Parota river valley are, and will cease to be, if their river is dammed, as I told you about in the last book.  Food sovereign people have the choice whether or not to participate in your competitive economic system.  And if they can already produce everything they need for themselves, don’t expect them to be very interested in competing in your economic system if you already control all the capital.  You can call them peasants, you can call them savages, you can call them old fashioned, uncultured, uncivilized, whatever.  But the fact remains that they’re Homo sapiens who can provide for themselves now, so why should they give that up just so they can live up to your idea of the right way for people to live?

So bringing this back to the streets of America now, during the Great Depression the government funded the Hoover Dam, created the California Conservation Corp and the National Park Service and a lot of other things like that, and created a lot of work for people to get people off unemployment.  Well we still have unemployed people, so obviously that job isn’t finished yet.  I’ve heard a lot of different stories of people making the transition from being unemployed to being employed, but they all end pretty much the same way:  That having somewhere to sleep, decent food, and a job to do gave them not just their basic physiological necessities, but also a sense of self-worth.

Now, I had to live at a homeless shelter briefly, so I know there is a minimum standard of living that people can expect here in America; that if they sink that low they can expect that someone will help them out.  And having lived through it, I also know that if you forced a dog to live that way, it would probably qualify as animal cruelty.

The problem we always had at the homeless shelter was getting all the things we needed together in one place at the same time.  We could sleep there, get two meals a day, or three if we had a job to go to, take showers, get our laundry done, get new clothes if we needed them, look through newspapers, and use the phone to call for job openings.  But you could never sleep well, the food was never enough, there were only four showers, and there was only one phone.  So the amount of sleep you could get there was never enough, the amount of food you could get there was never enough, you had to stand in line for f*cking ever to use the phone or take a shower, and they served the last meal of the day at about 3 in the afternoon.  So we constantly had to make choices about whether to spend our time walking to another homeless services place to get more food there, or going somewhere else where we could sleep some more, or standing in line to take a shower, or standing in line to use the phone, or going somewhere to look for a job.  On the surface it appeared that the people who ran the homeless shelter were making all the things we needed available to us, but in practice they weren’t, because there was not enough time in the day for us to get to them all.  The economy we had there at the homeless shelter didn’t work for sh*t because it was managed by people who had homes.

It wouldn’t be that difficult for a government organization to set up the same basic thing except in a way that could actually help get people off the streets.  All you’d need would be a barracks with bunks where people could sleep, shower, brush their teeth, get three decent meals a day, do their laundry, get bus passes, and use phones, that also had a day labor service attached to it, so employers could come there looking for temporary help, and people could get temporary government-sponsored employment helping to pick up litter at city parks or whatever other simple jobs needed to be done.  The living conditions there wouldn’t be great, in fact they shouldn’t be great, because you do still need an incentive for people to get jobs to support themselves and get themselves out of there—otherwise lots of people would abuse the system.  On the other hand, if your homeless support system only provides for people’s basic needs if they devote all their time to trying to navigate their way through it, they won’t have time to get jobs.

The most important part of making this program work would be treating the people who were in it like men and women who were just down on their luck, not like criminals or prison inmates.  If you don’t respect the people you’re trying to help, they aren’t going to trust you.  That’s going to create conflict.  And that’s going to divert their energy away from trying to help themselves and toward trying to keep themselves safe from you.

It is true that if we provided a stronger social safety net to help keep everyone employed, it would directly undermine the economic competition that Capitalism depends on.  The less severe the consequences for losing at the economic competition, the less motivated people would be to compete.  That means the less hard they would be willing to work.  That means the less people would care about finding more efficient ways of doing things.  But we are quickly approaching the physical limitations of the Earth—if we haven’t passed them already—so that fundamental change in our relationship to the environment is going to bring with it fundamental changes in our economic system anyway.

The problem with using the threat of homelessness as the driving force for your economic system is that in order to get people to take the threat seriously, you have to deliver on it.  That means you need to keep  some people unemployed all the time in order to motivate everyone else to compete.  But if you have to sacrifice their sense of self-worth to make your economic system function, you can plan on them doing whatever they have to do to maintain their sense of self worth.  And if they realize what you’re doing, then you can plan on them propping up their sense of self worth by hating you.  I’ve heard the same thing plenty of times from plenty of different people.  Older people who have spent their whole lives struggling to make it in the world, only to realize finally that the deck was stacked against them from the very beginning, trying to help younger people maintain their sense of self worth, when they’re falling into the same trap.  So what do the older people tell them?  Something like, “It’s not your fault you’re having so much trouble getting along in life.  It’s the White man trying to keep you down.”  Or whatever.

Result?  A lot of people fighting to maintain their sense of self worth by dreaming that some day they’re going to get the chance to kill  you.  Hey, you’re the one who wanted a competitive economy so badly.  Violence is competition.  Be careful what you wish for.

Oh, and by the way, what the f*ck else do you think a street gang is, besides a self-worth support group for young men who live in impoverished neighborhoods and who have realized they can get make better lives for themselves by breaking the law than they can by obeying it?

Here in the Phoenix area a couple dozen homeless people die from the heat every summer.  When you’re homeless, there’s nowhere for you to go to get out of the heat.  A couple years ago, some city planning commission thing had a big new homeless shelter built, and supposedly that’s going to solve all our homeless problems now.  Or is it?

Around that same time we passed a bunch of new laws here that basically outlaw homelessness.  Laws against loitering, sitting on the sidewalk, and urban camping.  That sounds harmless enough, until you consider those are all the main things homeless people do to stay out of the sun.  Urban camping means lying down to sleep anywhere.  In most parts of the country that mainly refers to sleeping in a park overnight.  But here in the desert that also means lying down in a city park to sleep in the shade in the middle of the day.  And here in the desert, people have been lying down to sleep in the shade in the middle of the day for as long as people have lived here.  The Mexicans call it a siesta.  And you know why?  Because when it’s 120º outside, taking a nap in the shade is the best way to stay cool.  You can be sure those laws were dreamed up by people who work in air-conditioned offices.

So when these anti-homeless laws were being passed, a bunch of reporters interviewed people on both sides of the argument.  And you know what the people who favored the new laws said?  A whole bunch of stuff like, “Well, there’s a park near my house, and I don’t want my kids to be exposed to homeless people, because I don’t think it’s healthy for them to have to see things like that.”

What can I say?  Capitalist pigs preying on other people and then expecting someone else to clean up their mess.  What did you expect?

One friend of mine helps run a local Anarchist magazine called Upheaval.  So he decided to start asking some questions and do a little poking around of his own.  He reviewed the minutes of the city council meeting in which the anti-homeless laws were voted on, and then he went to city hall and looked up some property tax records.  And you know what he discovered?  All the city council members who voted in favor of the laws that govern what homeless people should and shouldn’t be allowed to do, own their own houses!  Does that tell you anything?

That brings me to Food Not Bombs.  Food Not Bombs is a homeless support network that’s trying to do all the things I’ve outlined, but doesn’t have the resources a governmental agency would have at its disposal, because they’re Anarchists.

As I told you in the Inefficiency  of  Capitalism section of the Economics chapter, for business owners to throw away unsold food is more profitable than for them to give it away, because giving it away would cut into the demand that they depend on to keep their prices up.  So the entire food service industry in America is horrifically wasteful of food.  They’re so wasteful of food in fact, that all the food that gets thrown away in America would be enough to end hunger in America.  The one problem with that is that our economic system is driven by profits, not by human needs.  Having enough food for everyone in America is not the problem, but it’s not sufficient to solve the problem either.  The food also needs to be distributed according to who needs it, not according to who can pay the most for it.

So the people in the Food Not Bombs movement collect donations of unsold food from business owners who work in food services.  Some business owners throw their unsold food away intentionally, like the Capitalist pigs I accuse them of being.  But some food services business owners are basically Labor who own their own business.  (I use the terms Capital and Labor mainly in relation to people’s attitudes about who should control resources, not in relation to who actually does control the resources, as most people use the terms.)  They don’t have a problem with giving away the food they don’t sell, because they’re in business to make a living, not to prevent people from getting enough to eat.  There are probably a lot more business owners who would donate their unsold food, if only they had an effective way to get it to the people who need it.  Something like a governmental anti-poverty program, that could come around and pick up unsold food from stores and restaurants at the end of the day.  But we don’t have one of those, so these food service business owners donate it to the Anarchist anti-poverty program instead.
Food Not Bombs volunteers collect books and clothes and things like that too—anything that’s useful to people and easy to carry.   Some groups also collect bigger things, like used furniture or other household goods.  So they’re basically the Anarchist version of the Salvation Army.

Then the Food Not Bombs volunteers cook up a meal in someone’s kitchen (or multiple kitchens) and take it out to city parks or other public places to serve it.  So they are simultaneously saving food that would otherwise go to waste, feeding the homeless, publicly protesting the fact that throwing food away is more profitable than giving it to people who need it, and taking direct action to solve the problem themselves instead of complaining and waiting around for someone else to solve it.

There’s a saying among activists that the best measurement of your success is what your enemies do to try to stop you.  In numerous cities around the U.S., citizens, business people, and politicians have passed a lot of laws and arrested a lot of volunteers to try to make the problem go away.  A lot of FNB volunteers have been arrested for things like violating food codes and serving food to the public without a food service license—as though government officials are really that concerned about the health of people who don’t have enough to eat.  A lot of other volunteers have been bullied by the police.  In some cities, laws have been passed banning feeding the homeless in public.

Recently, feeding the homeless in Las Vegas was outlawed.  I used to hang out near the park where the FNB volunteers served food when I lived in Vegas, but they only served on Sunday afternoons. When I first got into town, I asked a homeless guy at the park if he knew of anywhere I could get something to eat.  He told me about a group that just been feeding people right there in the park but they’d just packed up and left a few minutes ago.   I’d never heard of Food Not Bombs before then, and I never crossed paths with them again.  But when I heard the Las Vegas chapter had just been outlawed, well, that was personal.

The people who pass these laws give a lot of different reasons for them, but it’s pretty obvious that there are just a few main reasons.  Homeless people make neighborhoods and business districts look bad, and everyone says they want to help the homeless, just not in their neighborhoods.  Another is that bringing that many homeless people together increases crime rates and causes health hazards.

Basically, the Capitalists are trying to fix the problems their inequitable economic system is creating by outlawing homelessness.  That is, punishing people for being defeated by the Capitalists.  Punishing people for losing at the Capitalists’ competition.  If you try to ban homeless people from congregating in public parks, you’re controlling who is and isn’t allowed to use public parks based on how much money they make, or how they dress, or whatever.

And that’s exactly what FNB volunteers go to public parks to protest.

I must say, that recently I heard that FNB in Prescott, Arizona (just up the road from here) has been using a tactic that’s proven to be an effective political aikido technique.  They don’t “serve food to the homeless”; they just have a picnic in the park across the street from city hall three times a week, which is open to the public, which includes homeless people.  So three times a week, lots of homeless people show up and eat salvaged food that was prepared by Anarchists, right across the street from city hall.  That might seem to be a form of resistance that’s more passive than actively drawing attention to the fact that they’re doing a job the government is failing to do, but turning your opponent’s own force against him—not winning a head-on collision against him—is exactly how aikido works.  I’m sure anyone who wanted to could go to FNB’s public picnic, whether they’re homeless or not.  But if you do, you’re still going to eat salvaged vegetarian food that was prepared by Anarchists, and you’re going to eat it in the company of homeless people that nobody is going to treat any differently than they treat you.  Then on election day you’re going to vote for whoever you feel is best suited to work in the big impressive-looking building across the street from the park where the Anarchists and the homeless people have their free public picnics three times a week.

Here’s the story of the Food Not Bombs movement that they post on their website.  They also have a book you can order to find out how to set up an FNB chapter in your area.   It includes everything from how to organize the group, how to get food donations, legal advice, and vegetarian recipes.

The Story of the Food Not Bombs

The first twenty-six years of the Food Not Bombs movement.

Food Not Bombs is one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements and is gaining momentum throughout the world. There are hundreds of autonomous chapters sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty. Food Not Bombs is not a charity. This energetic grassroots movement is active throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Food Not Bombs is organizing for peace and an end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. For over 25 years the movement has worked to end hunger and has supported actions to stop the globalization of the economy, restrictions to the movements of people, end exploitation and the destruction of the earth.
The first group was formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists. Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to nonviolent social change. Food Not Bombs has no formal leaders and strives to include everyone in its decision-making process. Each group recovers food that would otherwise be thrown out and makes fresh hot vegetarian meals that are served in outside in public spaces to anyone without restriction. Each independent group also serves free vegetarian meals at protests and other events. The San Francisco chapter has been arrested over 1,000 times in government’s effort to silence its protest against the city’s anti- homeless policies. Amnesty International states it will adopt those Food Not Bombs volunteers that are convicted as “Prisoners of Conscience” and will work for their unconditional release. Even though we are dedicated to nonviolence Food Not Bombs activists in the United States have been under investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Pentagon and other intelligence agencies. A number of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been arrested on terrorism charges but there has never been a conviction.

Food Not Bombs is often the first to provide food and supplies to the survivors of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. During the first three days after the 1989 Earthquake, Food Not Bombs was the only organization in San Francisco providing hot meals to the survivors and the Long Beach chapter provided food after the North Ridge Earthquake. Food Not Bombs was also the first to provide hot meals to the rescue workers responding to September 11th World Trade Center attacks. Food Not Bombs volunteers were among the first to provide food and help to the survivors of the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Our volunteers organized a national collection program and delivered bus and truckloads of food and supplies to the gulf region. We have been one of the only organizations sharing daily meals in New Orleans since Katrina. You can rely on Food Not Bombs in a disaster and we are ready to help in the future.

Food Not Bombs works in coalition with groups like Earth First!, The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anarchist Black Cross, the IWW, Homes Not Jails, Anti Racist Action, In Defense of Animals, the Free Radio Movement and other organizations on the cutting edge of positive social change and resistance to the new global austerity program. One collective publishes a movement wide newsletter called A Food Not Bombs Menu. Another hosts FNB News where you can learn more about the Food Not Bombs community. Food Not Bombs Publishing in Takoma Park, Maryland publishes books like On Conflict and Consensus, which has been an important guide for group democracy. We hope you will join us in taking direct action towards creating a world free from domination, coercion and violence. Food is a right, not a privilege.

Now here’s a news article from their website about legal challenges they face:

Another U.S. City Outlaws Feeding Homeless People

Mayor Buddy Dyer supported the ordinance.

Last week, Las Vegas outlawed feeding homeless people at city parks. Now, Orlando is following suit. Orlando is trying to keep charitable groups from feeding the homeless in downtown parks. Officials said transients gathering for weekly meals create safety and sanitary problems for businesses. The City Council voted to prohibit serving meals to groups of 25 or more people in parks and other public property within two miles of City Hall without a special permit. A group called Food Not Bombs, which has served weekly vegetarian meals for the homeless for more than a year, said it will continue illegally. The American Civil Liberties Union vows to sue, saying it’s a superficial fix that ignores the city’s homeless problem. Two of the city’s five commissioners voted against the ordinance, including Commissioners Robert Stuart, who runs the homeless shelter Christian Service Center, and Sam Ings, a retired police officer. Stuart told The Orlando Sentinel that Orlando is taking a step to ‘criminalize good-hearted people’ who he says are trying to help. He went on to tell the paper that group feedings in the parks had not become unwieldy to the city, as some had claimed. He said the ordinance says, ‘Orlando doesn’t care,’ the Sentinel reported. Ings said that although the commissioners are casting the ordinance as a public-safety issue, it is really an issue of the city wanting to ‘cover up’ the homeless problem. “We’re putting a Band-Aid on a critical problem,” he said. The commissioner who pushed for the ordinance, Patty Sheehan, said it was not an ‘easy day’ for her at all. She said the new ordinance against feeding homeless people has been ‘wrongly cast’ as anti-homeless. ‘I’ve been an advocate [for the homeless],’ she said. ‘Even though you’ll call me an enemy, I’ll still be your friend.” The Sentinel reported that about a dozen downtown residents and business owners spoke in favor of the rule. But more than three times that amount of people spoke against it. There were 45 speakers from various groups, including a formal declaration from the University of Central Florida’s student senate, who opposed outlawing feeding homeless people. Mayor Buddy Dyer supported the ordinance. Food Not Bombs said on its Web site that chapters in Venice, Calif.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Orlando, and Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada have been told that their programs should stop or move out of sight.

This might sound like a dumb question, but how are we supposed to put an end to poverty without putting an end to the economic system that depends on it?

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Somebody in or around Food Not Bombs is going to invent a new movement called Schools Not Prisons, just because this idea is too cool to ignore.

You know how a lot of times kids who get convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison get sent to prisons for young first-time offenders to teach them their lessons, in a way that keeps them separated from hardened criminals?  They do that because evidently somebody discovered something that’s not so hard to imagine:  If you send young first-time offenders to prison with hardened criminals, the kids may learn something from the prison administrators about why they shouldn’t break the law, but they’re going to learn a lot more from their fellow inmates about being criminals.  That means that the net result of the young first-time offenders’ incarceration among hardened criminals is going to be a decreased sense of respect for the law, instead of an increased sense of respect for the law, which was supposed to be the point of punishing them for their crimes in the first place.

A lot of people have been wondering a lot lately how to get vagrant kids off the street.  Speaking as someone who had to spend a few weeks at a homeless shelter once, and who’s known a lot of street kids in my life, let me tell you something about being homeless…

There are two basic communities of homeless people.  One group is the older people who have had a run of bad luck and lost everything.  A lot of times it’s their own fault.  Even if it’s not entirely their own fault, there isn’t a whole lot anyone else can do about it, because these people are mentally disabled, crazy, alcoholics, drug addicts, or whatever.  Those are the people most people think of when they think of homeless people, and those are the kinds of people that most homeless programs are set up to “help”.  The best help you can give these people is to give them somewhere to sleep, something to eat, an address where they can receive mail, access to help wanted ads and a telephone, somewhere to take a shower, somewhere to get their clothes washed, and so on.  In other words, they provide for their basic human biological needs, and a little help getting themselves out of the situation, for anyone who cares to take advantage of it.

Living at a homeless shelter has to be one of the most spirit crushing, soul-destroying things anyone can possibly experience in the free adult world.   Sure, they provide you with basic biological needs and the chance for a future as a functional human being, but at what cost?  At the Salvation Army where I stayed, they fed us food that wasn’t fit for a dog.  Their idea of giving us somewhere to sleep was a 1/2” foam camping pad, a blanket, and a few square feet of hard tile floor.  They turned out the lights at 9:00 and woke us up at 4:00 in the morning, so we could get an early start on looking for a job.  I say “woke us up” mostly as a euphemism—that is, they “woke us up” in the sense that you need to wake a person up after he’s spent a night lying on a hard floor surrounded by 50 snoring, coughing, farting men.  And even to get that for a place to sleep, you had to sit through an hour-long nightly sermon in the chapel.  Their idea of a shower was a tile-lined room with four shower-heads running constantly, a long line of naked men standing outside the door, and a staff member sitting outside the door watching to make sure nobody got beaten up or anything.  Their idea of “a telephone” was literally a telephone, and 20 or 30 or 40 people standing in line to use it. And their idea of giving you something to do for the day was to separate the men from the women into two different rooms and turn on a big TV in each room playing football games or reruns or whatever was on that appealed to the largest demographic in the room.  I think they had a few newspapers and magazines and paperbacks lying around too.  In other words, if your goal in life was to live like barnyard livestock, the homeless shelter offered you everything you could ever ask for.  But if that’s not your goal, and you spend a few weeks living like this, how long can you really hold on to any sense of hope for the future?

The other group of homeless people are kids mostly in their teens and early 20s. Some of them have problems with no easy solution, but I’d have to bet those kids are in the minority.  A lot of street kids have set out to make a life for themselves but took a wrong turn somewhere.  A lot of them set out to make a life for themselves and had basically nothing to start with. A lot of them are trying to figure out what they want in life and where to look for it, and so far they’ve figured out that devoting their lives to working at pointless jobs just so they can earn meager paychecks isn’t what they’re looking for.  If the only place they have to go is somewhere like the Salvation Army where I stayed, are their problems ever going to be solved?  Or are they going to get worse?   If your idea of helping these kids is to give them the choice between providing for their biological needs or preserving their human dignity, how exactly are you solving anything?  That’s why most street kids prefer to take their chances on the street.  If you try to solve their problems by teaching these kids (either intentionally or unintentionally) that trying to get anywhere in life is a waste of time, just like so many of the 50-year-old alcoholics they have to eat and sleep and shower next to think it is—and seem to be proving by the fact that they’re 30 years older than these kids and are still living like human livestock—do you think that’s going to encourage kids to try to get off the street, or discourage them?  If they do get off the streets, is it going to be as a result of anything you did?  If homeless street kids are a burden to society, and you have the resources they need to start making a life for themselves on their own, but you offer them those resources in a way that makes the kids not want your help, is that going to decrease, or increase, the length of time each of these kids are going to place a burden on society?

So here’s my solution:

Schools Not Prisons is an auxiliary movement to Food Not Bombs.  (I can say this even though I don’t have any official authority among Food Not Bombs, because Food Not Bombs is not an official organization, it’s an Anarchistic movement, where nobody has any official authority over anybody.  They are organized by ideas that work so well that lots of people join in, turn those ideas into reality, and make those ideas keep happening, without anyone needing to control those ideas.  You’re more than welcome to try to invent new auxiliary movements to Food Not Bombs if you like, but, ah, don’t be surprised if you discover that I’m a lot better than you are at coming up with new ideas that Anarchistically-minded people pay attention to.  Anyway…)

A Schools Not Prisons house needs three large main rooms, separated from each other.  It can have more rooms, and obviously needs a few essential rooms, like a bathroom and a kitchen, but these three main rooms are critical.

One of the main rooms is the barracks.  The barracks is full of bunk beds with thick mattresses.  You can build bunk beds yourself, and you can buy good foam mattresses pretty cheaply at an army surplus store.  The barracks also has lockers in it, for people to lock up their things.  The barracks is kept quiet and is reserved for sleeping, so anybody can get good rest any time of the night or day.  It isn’t segregated between men and women, and couples are allowed to sleep together, provided they can fit into a bed together.  That is, their ability to sleep together isn’t going to be controlled by anyone else, but it might be controlled by physical space limitations.
One of the main rooms is the library.  That’s another quiet room, provided for the sake of anyone who wants to spend their waking hours doing quiet things in a quiet environment.  The room will have books in it, and whatever other resources are available that lend themselves to quiet activities.

The third main room is the common room.  The common room is for any activities that don’t fit into the barracks or library.  It will have tables and chairs, because this is where meals will be served and eaten.  The common room will also have a stage at one end, for the sake of whoever wants to put on any kind of a presentation.   This is a room where people can socialize and do whatever else they want.  Most importantly, it doesn’t have a TV!

The rules of the Schools Not Prisons house are pretty simple:

1:  We’re all friends here, or at least we act like we’re friends, even if you don’t personally like each other.  Respect people, settle your differences peacefully, don’t insult people, threaten them, steal from them, fight with them, or anything else like that.  If you’ve ever watched Sesame Street, you know everything you need to know about how to get along with people here.

2:  Don’t break the law here, because if you do, we can get into trouble.  Don’t do drugs or sell drugs, no prostitution, and no alcohol, even if you’re a legal age.

3:  If you cause trouble for anybody, we throw you out.  This isn’t a crack house; this is a place for people who don’t want to live in a crack house.

4:  This is a shelter for people under the age of 30.  If you’re over the age of 30 and have something to contribute to the environment, we’ll let you stay here.  If not, we won’t.

(Despite what a lot of people might think, among people who have spent much time among street kids, it’s not terribly difficult to differentiate between older street people who help watch out for younger street people and older street people who see younger street people as prey.  The easiest way to tell the difference is: Do street kids look up to these older people, or avoid them?)

Staffing the place shouldn’t be too hard.  There are plenty of baby boomers in America who are hurtling toward retirement age, who are going to have a lot of free time on their hands pretty soon.  They’re the ones who lit this particular torch; so I bet a lot of them would love do something to help out the kids who are carrying it now.  There are also plenty of street kids who aren’t homeless but would probably love to help create an environment to help out other street kids.  If any street kids wanted to live at a Schools Not Prisons house very long, they could help out by doing chores around the place.  If they contributed half an hour’s work every day, and they were being paid minimum wage for it, that would work out to about $2 a day, after taxes.  That would work out to about $60 a month in rent.  That’s not a bad deal at all.

The social and economic structure I’m suggesting here is the way most street kids I’ve known live already.  Contrary to what the mainstream media would like you to believe, these kids aren’t just a bunch of good-for-nothing troublemakers.  They all understand Sesame Street etiquette, and they practice it amongst themselves.  When you all live outside the law, business owners and politicians see you as a plague infesting the streets, because you don’t live your life around earning and spending money, you don’t pay any taxes, you own extremely few possessions, and you participate in the financial economic system of the world as little as possible.  That makes you a threat to these people, because they have very little control over the way you live your life, which means it’s extremely difficult for them to control your life in a way that will benefit them.  I’m sure most business owners and politicians don’t carry their line of reasoning that far, at least, not consciously, but I am pretty sure they carry it as far as seeing that they do own a lot of property and they do pay a lot of taxes, and if they don’t want street kids infesting their neighborhoods, guess who the police are going to listen to.  Anyway, my point is, when you live out on the streets, and especially if you live out on the streets by choice, you can’t expect the police to give a f*ck about you, so you have to solve your own problems within your own community.

More importantly though, I think, most street kids understand Sesame Street etiquette a lot better than most so-called “responsible” adults, which is why they don’t want to participate in the world of “responsible” adults.  Most of these kids are so nice to each other just because they feel that’s how people should be, and most “responsible” adults aren’t nearly that nice to each other.  So these kids set out to make their own world for themselves in their own way.  “Responsible” adults compete against each other for everything in sight, from jobs to houses to social status to material possessions.  If you try to participate in the “responsible” adult world, but you don’t feel like competing against people every minute of your life, you’re f*cked, which is why these kids don’t bother.  And I must say, there seems to be something to be said for people living this way.  After all, no Al-Queda terrorist has ever crashed an airliner into a homeless shelter, have they?

A lot of people say that street kids are a burden to society, that they’re leeches or parasites or whatever.  Like I said, they don’t pay taxes but they use the streets and the sidewalks and everything else that other people pay taxes for.  Sometimes they collect food stamps and welfare checks or whatever, which means the tax money other people paid is being given away to them.   And if paying money was the only way for people to contribute to their society, well I guess you’d be right.  But, ah, let me tell you something about economics of a much larger scale…

The Use Value economy recognizes the entire global environment and the entire realm of human behavior as an economic system.  Remember what I’ve said in the first two books about every other culture in the world valuing work for material reward less than Western culture does, because Western culture has always been the most materially prosperous, and therefore has attached the strongest cultural values to working for material reward?  And you remember what I said about it being impossible to construct a functional global economic system that doesn’t recognize the good qualities that other people have to offer?

If some kid is willing to sleep under a bridge and scavenge food out of a dumpster behind a restaurant when it closes, in what meaningful way is that different from someone else at some other point in history sleeping under a tree and picking wild fruit to eat?  So what else do you call these kids beside modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherers?   So guess what:  Street kids’ social and economic structures and values work the same way that nomadic hunter-gatherer’s social and economic structures have always worked.  I’m sure they didn’t do this intentionally, but they figured it out on their own, and they adapted it to fit their living conditions.

As a modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer, just as for nomadic hunter-gatherers at any other time or place, you can only own as many possessions as you can carry.  (You can try leaving some stuff somewhere you think it will be safe, but if you do, you’re taking a big risk on it being stolen, which is why you don’t do it with anything you value greatly and can’t replace easily.)  A lot of homeless people use shopping carts to let them carry a lot of possessions with them when they move around, but street kids don’t do that.  Why would they?  Pushing a shopping cart full of your worldly possessions down the street makes you look homeless!  Street kids still have enough sense of dignity left not to sink to that.

The fact that older homeless people push their worldly possessions around in shopping carts and street kids don’t ought to be any anthropologist’s first clue that they are two distinctly different groups of people.  The older homeless people with their shopping carts are people who are still trying to make it in our materialistic economy, which is why they’ve found the most effective way to own material possessions given their living conditions.  The street kids don’t care as much about material possessions, which must mean that they’re satisfying themselves with their lives in some other way.  These kids are so uninterested in participating in a materialistic economy that collectively they’ve invented (or, reinvented) their own economic system.

What takes the place of material possessions in any non-Western economic system?  Cultural values.  Where do cultural values come from?  From enough individuals figuring out these values that collectively they become the cultural values of that group of people.  Once those cultural values are established, other people can join the culture either by figuring out those values on their own and merging themselves into the greater culture, or by learning the cultural values that other people figured out in order to be able to join the existing culture.

As a modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer, one way or another, you learn to make your life complete with the material possessions you can carry with you.  The modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer economic system is not one where people own property, it works the same way any nomadic hunter-gatherer economic system has ever worked:  Material goods move from place to place, and if they move through your possession, you get to make use of them for a while.  If you own something particularly cool, like a portable mp3 player, sooner or later, somebody’s probably going to steal it.  That’s low when people do it, but it does happen, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.  Luckily, however, someone stealing your mp3 player will not ruin your life.  If it does ruin your life, you won’t survive on the streets very long.  On the other hand, if you don’t own anything particularly valuable, you’re basically immune to theft.  Whatever possessions you call your own are yours free and clear.  Material goods necessary to maintain biological survival obviously move through the modern urban hunter-gatherer community at a rate sufficient to maintain everyone’s biological survival, because if they didn’t, the culture couldn’t survive.  If these kids live this way by choice, and they find enough material resources to maintain their biological survival, what else are they supposed to need to make their lives complete?

Of course, I said, “if they live this way by choice.”   As it concerns most people who succeed to some degree in the “responsible” adult world, that statement rather implies that these kids had the choice between living on the street or living in some other way that offered them benefits that were somehow equitable.  If your choices are between living on the street or living with abusive parents that’s not much of a choice, the only choice you have is how to make the best of a bad situation.  Neither of your choices was particularly good.

That’s where Schools Not Prisons comes in.  Quite simply, you take the social and economic structure that already exists among street kids, and you put into a building.  You give these kids decent beds to sleep in, and give them lockers to put their few worldly possessions in.  (Although I bet you’d be surprised how little use the locks on the lockers would get—I’m willing to bet a lot of street kids would feel like saving themselves the risk of their stuff getting stolen wasn’t even worth the hassle of locking and unlocking their lockers.  You’d just have to put locks on the lockers for the sake of anyone who did want to use them, and for the sake of keeping Schools Not Prisons from seeming like a den of thieves.)

Then you add some more material goods into the economic system that wouldn’t’ve gotten there otherwise.  First of all, you feed the kids the same way Food Not Bombs feeds anyone.  Vegetarian food is cheap—especially when it’s donated for free from restaurants or grocery stores whose managers were just going to throw it away, which is where Food Not Bombs gets most of their food.  With vegetarian ingredients, you can make healthy, substantial, appetizing, non-personally-insulting food. (I swear, I’d rather starve to death than eat another meal at that Salvation Army!)

Now that you’ve created an environment where the social and economic system of the modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherers functions and their immediate survival needs are met, you’ve created an environment where the kids are going to feel comfortable, where they feel like they fit in, where they feel like they belong, and where they find the experience of living there personally meaningful.  You give them some books to read and a place to read them where they feel like the world makes sense, and you just might be surprised by how much more they could learn from those books than they could otherwise.  You give them some books, a room, some tables and chairs, and a place to meet other people who might know more than they do about something they want to learn more about, and you just might be surprised by how much more they could learn from each other than they could’ve learned in school.  Sure, books would be bound to disappear out of the library from time to time, but I’m willing to bet that books would appear in the library just about as frequently.

A lot street kids have a lot of artistic or other creative talents, which would’ve gone to waste working at a pointless minimum wage job.  So what do these kids do?  The exact same thing my brother and I and all of our relatives have always done, which is to try to find a way to use their creative talents to create a life for themselves they can be satisfied with.  That’s why you put a stage in the common room, and you could also put some scrap paper, pencils, erasers, and a few other basic art supplies in there too.  Any time nobody was on the stage, anybody would be free to get up there and do anything they wanted.  You’d probably end up with an open mike night (assuming you had a microphone) every night of the week, where kids would get up to read their poetry, sing, play instruments, or whatever.

Street kids are street kids because they don’t give a f*ck about money or material goods in any sense that most “responsible” adults do.  Our Western Capitalist economy revolves around money and material goods, so if your life doesn’t, you’re left out in the cold—literally.  The way the social, economic, and educational systems that America is founded upon function, if you don’t live your life around money, material goods, and competing against other people every minute of your life, everything you are and everything you could be gets thrown right in garbage.  So all you have to do to solve that problem is to create a social, economic, and educational system that doesn’t revolve around money, material goods, and constant competition.

In summary, a Schools Not Prisons house is a building where street kids get:

A roof over their heads, somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and somewhere to keep their few worldly possessions safe;

An environment where they feel like the world makes sense;

An environment where they can work to earn their keep in a way they find personally meaningful and that produces tangible results;

An opportunity to learn things in a way they find personally meaningful; and

An outlet for their creative talents.

In other words, you create a social and economic system where people can satisfy their immediate survival needs, find spiritual meaning in their lives, learn, work, socialize, and enjoy themselves.  In other words, all the things that make the “responsible” adult world function.  Or to look at it another way, a Schools Not Prisons house is an environment where people get to survive, be safe, feel safe, reproduce (or at least, meet up with potential romantic partners), make friends, be respected, feel good, and put their abilities to use—in other words, where they get to fulfill all of their needs as human beings.  Every culture, society, and civilization that has ever succeeded has succeeded by offering these things to its people, so I’d have to say that Schools Not Prisons is already off to a good start, and it doesn’t even officially exist yet!

On a larger scope, the Schools Not Prisons movement is, in effect, my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen made up of buildings spread all over the world.  That is, it’s an opportunity to build cultural values based on something other than material wealth.  As I’m sure you recall from the Thermodynamics chapter, “our” Western cultural values of the pursuit of happiness through the pursuit of ever more material goods can’t possibly endure indefinitely—or even, for very much longer—so the sooner we start looking for another way to make our civilization function, the better.  The inevitable result of our self-destructive social and economic systems is going to be more and more people not being able to survive in our economic system by competing against everyone else constantly.  That means more homeless people, including more street kids.  If the Schools Not Prisons movement is successful, then as the number of street kids grows, the number of Schools Not Prisons houses is sure to grow.  Even if the only thing the Schools Not Prisons movement can do is to stay out of the way and help get other people out of the way while the rest of our economy collapses around it, then once again, my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen, embodied here in the Schools Not Prisons movement, will take over the world for no other reason than because it will be the only social and economic system left standing.  It will do that because its social and economic systems are constructed on human evolution itself, which means that as a social and economic system, it can survive for as long as the human race survives.

Would street kids who wanted to go roam the country take advantage of a free youth hostel network like this?  Of course they would.  But then, a lot of those kids do it anyway, even though a network of free hostels like this doesn’t exist.  Would a network of free youth hostels encourage a lot of kids to go out roaming the country who wouldn’t’ve done it otherwise?  Of course it would.  Some street kids set out on the streets by choice because that’s the only way they can find to learn the things they’re interested in learning about.  Some street kids don’t end up on the streets by choice, and have to learn those things in order to survive.  Whether they end up on the streets by choice or not, street kids try to make the best of their situation just like everyone else in the world does.  If you have to pursue your education by living outside the law and constantly trying to stay a step ahead of the law, what kind of an education do you think that’s going to turn out to be?
That’s why I call this movement Schools Not Prisons.

Of course, every Schools Not Prisons house would have to keep on hand lots of information about teen pregnancy, STDs, drug abuse, depression, suicide, runaway hotlines, gang violence, domestic violence, etc., etc..  The goal is not to help kids run away from their problems, the goal is to help kids face their problems.

Oh, one other thing.  You remember what I said in the Democracy 2.0 section of the Generation of Heroes chapter, about how Americans who haven’t seen much of America can’t possibly be expected to offer very well-informed input into the collective decision-making process of our country?

Heh, heh, heh…

I’m sure that most “responsible” adults think this is all just a bunch of wishful thinking and are certain something like this could never work.  I’m equally sure that most street kids in America who hear about this are going to be certain that this could work and they would have joined the Schools Not Prisons movement long ago, if only it existed.

Well, I guess that just illustrates all too clearly the whole reason “responsible” adults can’t figure out how to get street kids off the streets, doesn’t it?

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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The Roswell Conspiracy movement isn’t a part of Globalization 4.0, but it is a good illustration of the role of conspiracies and conspiracy theorists in society.

First, let’s talk a little about my own background in conspiracies.  I work in theatre, remember?  Theatre turns conspiracy into a fine art.  First, psychological thrillers are a major style of storytelling, in movies, plays, and novels.  And that’s my favorite thing to write.  Then there’s acting, which is the manipulation of people’s perceptions through the presentation style of the information you give them.  And that’s what all these books have been about.  Then there’s technical theatre, which is not merely the art of creating what the audience sees, but also the art of creating what the audience believes  they see.   And that’s what I do for a living right now.  So let’s just say that I’ve got a certain perspective on conspiracies that most people don’t share.

Then there’s my scientific background and, more importantly, my basic ability to understand how science works, which means my ability to separate myself from a situation and look at the information that actually exists.  Basically, my ability to look at the sun and at the stars but then, upon learning that they’re the same thing, to realize that the fact that they look different to me doesn’t prove anything, and neither does the fact that we use two different words to refer to them.

You remember what I said back in the Methodology chapter, how I grew up believing that anything could be real, but trying to figure out how to prove that anything was real?  What the f*ck do you think science is?  Well, that was about how my parents saw the world while I was growing up, and one way or another it’s probably how they grew up, and that’s basically the net result of how my grandparents on my dad’s side lived, when my artist grandmother and my engineer grandfather would get into the discussions about the nature of reality.

I’ve told you all about how child development shapes people’s perceptions of the world.  Now a lot of people, including Tom Friedman, are wondering why American kids are growing up with cotton candy for brains, and what to do about it.  Well it’s not simply a matter of what you teach kids, or even how badly they want to learn it, but also of when you teach it to them and how.

One night when I was about four, I was outside with my dad and we were looking up at the stars. He said something like, “You see all those stars up there?  They’re all just like the sun.”
To which I said something like, “No, the sun is a lot bigger and brighter.”  (Or however I would’ve said that when I was four years old.)

And he said something like, “Ah!  No, that’s just how the sun looks to us.  The sun is a lot closer to us than the other stars, which is why it looks so big and bright.”  Then I think he pointed over to the house and said, “You know how big the house really is.  From here it looks smaller than it does when you’re standing on the front porch.”

I’ve known a lot of people who would’ve told their four-year-olds that stars are the spirits of all the people who have gone up to Heaven, and their god put them there so everyone will remember he’s watching over them so they won’t feel afraid in the dark of the night, or something like that.  Rather than try to explain to their kids what stars really are, these parents would fill their kids’ brains up misinformation.  Then when the kids finally learned about stars in third or fourth or fifth or sixth grade or whenever, they’d have strong emotional attachments to what their parents told them, and now they’d be learning something completely different from their teachers, so their heads would be filled with all kinds of conflicting information, with the end result that they’d never really understand what stars were.  But what difference does it really make anyway, right?  Stars are really far away.  It doesn’t really matter what stars are, does it?

But now you’ve taught your kid that when life gets too confusing he can just make something up and act as if it was real.  Now he’s discovered—or at least, thinks he’s discovered—that all reality is subjective.

I’ve known a lot of other people who wouldn’t’ve told their kids anything about stars.  They would’ve just told them they were stars and then said something about, “Look how pretty they are.”  These people say that children should just be allowed to enjoy being children while they have the chance.   What these people don’t realize is that learning how the world works is a critical part of childhood development.  The moment that your child first becomes aware of stars and asks what they are is the moment of his life that he’s most receptive to learning about them—or one of a few moments, maybe.  If you make him wait four or five more years for someone else to teach him about them by showing him pictures of them in a book during the daytime—which is how children learn about stars in school—then all they’re going to be to him are pretty things up in the sky that are kind of like the sun but really far away.  His teacher will never be able to make stars as personally meaningful to him as you could’ve on the night he first asked you about them.
So if all you teach your children about is how to be children, just because you wish you could be a child again, or because you want to protect them from the emotional stress of growing up, then when they grow up to be adults, all they’re going to know how to do is how to be children.  And then they’re going to kick and scream and say that life ain’t fair when hard-working Chinese come to America and take all the good jobs.

Anyway, my dad taught me the importance of perspective in observation by giving me this introduction to basic astrophysics at the age of four.  Many years later I was engaged to my fiancée the wealthy heiress convicted felon, who grew up surrounded by people who wanted to manipulate everyone else’s perception of reality and had tons of material resources available to help them do it.  And I’ve had a few friends who’ve worked in military intelligence who’ve told me what they think about it.  So here’s all of that applied to the Roswell incident…

The first problem with figuring out what happened in Roswell is that there are no reliable reference sources.  There’s a whole bunch of civilians who say one thing, and there’s a whole bunch of government officials who say the complete opposite, and there’s no physical proof to back up anything anyone says.  So let’s all put our on deerstalker caps and use the Sherlock Holmes approach on the stories themselves.

I’ve been to the UFO Museum in Roswell, where they have a very detailed account of the civilian version of the story.  That was years ago, and I can’t remember all of details, but I can remember the basic outline of the story, anyway.

One night in the summer of 1947, a rancher saw something that looked like a bright shooting star.  It was awfully low though—so low that it looked like it landed somewhere out on his ranch.  He thought it might’ve been a plane crash.  So he saddled up a horse and rode out to where he saw it go down.

There, he found a crashed flying saucer made of some strange metal he’d never seen before, and five dead aliens.

So he went back to the house and called the sheriff.  The sheriff came and looked at it, and then he called someone on the nearby air force base.

The air force officials sent a salvage team out to the site.  They closed it off, wouldn’t let anyone near it, and carted everything off, leaving not a scrap of wreckage.

They also ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets from the local mortuary.

Over the next week, they flew nine cargo planes into the airforce base, loaded them up with debris, and flew them out again.

They brought the five dead aliens into the town coroner.  Air force doctors and nurses performed autopsies on them, trying to figure out what exactly they were.

Everyone in the military was sworn to secrecy.  But two or three of the nurses told some friends or family anyway.  They all died in accidents soon afterwards.

Later, the rancher retracted his story, and said he was just imagining it.

The official military report said it was a weather balloon.

About 30 years after the event, the town coroner said that he’d helped with the autopsies on the aliens.

Around that same time, a bunch of physicists who’d worked in top-secret government labs started coming forward and saying they’d examined the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that had been recovered.

I think that pretty well covers the basic Roswell story.

I have one friend who served in the Navy long after the Roswell incident.  He’d recently abandoned Christianity.  Now he felt like there was something missing from his life.  So he went looking around for something else to think about now, and he came upon the general UFO mystery—the Roswell incident and other UFO sightings.  He was stationed in San Diego at the time.  He found out about a UFO group in the area, where a bunch of people would get together and go out at night with their telescopes looking for UFOs, and get together to talk about UFOs, and stuff like that.

As it turned out, a lot of people in the UFO group were ex-Christians like him.  They all felt that leaving Christianity had left them with an empty feeling, and that looking for UFOs filled it up again.

One night in 1997, a really weird flying-saucer-looking thing covered in lights came swooping out of the sky and hovered over Phoenix for several minutes, hovering around in circles and side to side, before it flew off again.  It didn’t move like any kind of aircraft that exists on Earth.  Air force spokespersons later said that they’d been testing some new kinds of flares.  But the thing moved as a solid unit.  And it although it didn’t look like an aircraft, it looked even less like flares.  Some of my friends here saw it, and so did thousands of other people.

All the pieces fit together to make a tidy little story.  We keep having these encounters with UFOs, the government keeps trying to cover them up, they keep coming up with absurd explanations for what people saw, they keep leaving a lot of loose ends, and people keep tugging on those loose ends trying to piece together an explanation for what’s going on.  When you look at all the clues people have discovered by now, it looks pretty convincing that the government is trying to keep us from finding out about something.

So the questions are:  Is there alien life out there in the universe somewhere?  Are they studying us?  Are they trying to contact us?  And to what end?

Now let’s look at the story in relation to the rest of the world.

First of all, I’ve heard a lot of Christians talk about how the conditions of the Earth make the evolution of life here so improbable that it must prove their god created the Earth specifically for us to live on.  If the Earth was a few miles closer or further away from the sun, life as we know it could never have existed here.  There’s a bunch of other characteristics they point to that I won’t bother going into here but that you can Google search for easily enough.  The point is, they’re trying to use science to prove divine intervention in the lifecycles of our planet.

There are just two problems with that argument.  First of all, supernatural powers are unobservable, by definition.  That means their existence or non-existence is impossible to prove scientifically, by definition.

The other problem is that they’re trying to use circumstantial evidence to prove a pre-conceived belief, and they’re rejecting the possibility that the circumstantial evidence could indicate anything else.  The Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Evolution were both discovered using circumstantial evidence, and for the sake of argument let’s say that Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin both had ideas ahead of time of what all the evidence was going to prove.  But even if that is true, I think it’s rather self-evident that Albert Einstein believed in Relativity a lot less than Christians believe in their god, for the simple reason that belief in the Christian god is a pre-requisite for being a Christian; his existence or non-existence is not open to debate or question among Christians.

Charles Darwin didn’t believe in evolution before he discovered the Theory of Evolution; he believed there had to be a connection between the way children inherit characteristics from their parents, and the way closely related species of animals who have lived in different environments for long periods of time have different characteristics.  So he looked around for all the circumstantial evidence he could find, and then figured out how all the pieces fit together to explain how the parts of the world people could observe directly worked.  If anyone else could fit the circumstantial evidence together to explain more accurately how the world worked, they were welcome to try.  And that’s exactly what people have been doing ever since.  But no one has ever disproven the connection between children inheriting their characteristics from their parents and species of animals who have lived in different conditions for many, many generations having different characteristics.  Instead, the continuing search for evidence has only resulted in the continuing refinement of our understanding of how that basic process works.

Anyway, since Christians were trying to use science to prove the existence of their god, some scientists accepted the challenge and started looking for more evidence, trying to find other ways the circumstantial evidence could fit together, and seeing what it indicated.  And doing all of that took them probably, oh, about thirty seconds.

The body of evidence the Christians had compiled about the relationship between the characteristics of the Earth and our dependence on them was extensive and it was accurate.  They just left out one thing:  They didn’t compare it to the number of planets in the universe.  There are hundreds of billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies.  Astronomers have discovered they can detect planets orbiting stars according to the motion of the star—whether or not the star moves like it’s being affected by the gravity pull of something nearby.  So even though they can’t count how many planets there are in the universe exactly, they can get a rough idea.  Even if we assume that each of the hundreds of billions of stars in each of the billions of galaxies has one planet orbiting it on the average, that means there are hundreds of billions of billions of planets in the galaxy.

So the scientists took the Christians’ astronomically small probability of life evolving on Earth and compared it to the even more astronomically large number of planets in the universe, and came up with something on the order of 10,000 planets where life had evolved.

Now we have to ask some more questions.  How many of those planets have life living on them right now?   Eventually our planet is going to be destroyed when our sun/star/whatever starts to burn out and turns into a red giant.  And on how many of that statistical number of planets has life yet to evolve?

On how many of those planets has intelligent life evolved?  And on how many of those planets is there intelligent life living right now?  And on how many of those planets has the intelligent life reached a level of technological development that allows them to travel into space?  Our own species has been able to travel into space for about 50 of the 7,000,000 years of our history.

How many intelligent species have even developed to a technological level that let them discover radio waves?  We could at least communicate with intelligent life on other planets, even if we couldn’t travel to the other planets.  But radio waves only travel at the speed of light.  If we had discovered radio waves, built a radio, and sent a message into space immediately, we couldn’t possibly get a response from another planet more than about 50 light years away, because you have to account for the time it would take the radio waves to cover that distance.  And we are still talking about 10,000 possible species that could answer us, spread out over billions of galaxies.

The next problem is that discovering radio waves was a major step along the road to discovering the Theory of Relativity.  That means that any species that developed a technological level to let them discover radio waves would discover how to annihilate themselves with nuclear weapons soon afterwards.  So you can bet that at least a few of them made that mistake.

The next thing you have to consider is the size of the universe, which is incomprehensibly large compared to the way we naturally perceive the world.  Obviously, there is nothing here on Earth we can compare to the size of the entire universe.  It’s about ten trillion light years in diameter.  Understanding what that means would require you to understand how big a trillion was, and how big a light year was.  Mathematicians and astronomers can figure it out easily enough, but it’s just one of those things that is never going to become personally meaningful to people over the course of their everyday lives.

Basically, ten thousand species of intelligent life spread out throughout the universe would be the equivalent of ten thousand single celled organisms swimming in the Pacific Ocean.  Like, there’s one microscopic organism swimming off the coast of Alaska, another off the coast of California, another over by Japan, another down by Australia, and so on.  What do you think the odds are any of them are ever going to find each other?

The next thing you have to consider is that we’ve basically exhausted the energy resources of our planet and we still haven’t figured out how to break the light barrier.  And not only that, we haven’t even figured out any conceivable way anyone else could break the light barrier.  So now we’re talking about 10,000 microscopic organisms swimming in the Pacific Ocean, none of which will swim more than 10 feet from the place of their birth ever in their lives.  If some aliens could figure out a way to do it, they would have to live on a planet that for some reason had vastly greater energy resources than our own does.  I’m pretty sure that no physicists or geologists have ever figured out what that form of energy could be, or how that much of it could be concentrated on one planet.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics affects them the same way it affects us, and I’ve already told you enough about that.  A star has an infinite supply of energy, as far as we’re concerned, and if we could find a way to extract it directly from the star/sun/whatever, we wouldn’t have to wait for it to shine on the Earth in the form of sunlight.  But the temperature of a star/sun/whatever is, like, 2 million degrees or something, which is hot enough to vaporize anything in the solar system.  So you can’t just land a bunch of mining equipment on the sun and dig up some sunlight to put in your spaceship’s fuel tank.

So to summarize to this point, if we assume there are 10,000 Earth-like planets in the universe, and we assume that life on those planets evolved pretty much the same way it did here, which is not a bad guess (for reasons I’ll explain more about in the next chapter), in order for us to be able to contact alien life:

An intelligent species would’ve had to evolve,

And live on that planet now,

And have developed to a space-age technological level,

At the same time we did,

Without wiping themselves out in a nuclear war,

And live on a planet that orbited one of the nearest few dozen of the hundreds of billions of billions of stars in the universe.

Basically, our chances of discovering intelligent alien life are worse than the chances of everyone on Earth winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning at the exact same instant.

So why do so many people feel like we must be able to find intelligent life in the universe anyway?
Do the words sensory  illusion ring a bell?

Let’s go back to my friend the ex-Christian UFO watcher and all his ex-Christian UFO watcher friends.  What psychological effect does religion have on people that the idea of contacting space-traveling aliens would also give them?  How about the feeling of being connected to someone else out there in the universe somewhere?  And the feeling of being connected to someone more powerful than themselves?

Next, how has the prospects of finding alien life shaped American’s cultural background over the course of the 20th century?

The first story about intelligent alien life, or at least, the first well-known story, was The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.  From the moment people discovered other planets and discovered aviation, it was inevitable that someone was going to imagine intelligent life on another planet and imagine a way for one or the other to travel to the other planet.  And a new genre of science fiction was born.

Then, during the Kennedy administration, we landed a manned spacecraft on the moon.  Now the possibility that we could travel into space became personally meaningful to a hell of a lot of people.  So a lot more people began imagining a lot more possibilities.  You can just imagine what that did to the science fiction industry.  Within a few years, Gene Roddenberry was filming the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy were beaming up to the starship Enterprise every week.  And a lot of anonymous crewmembers in red shirts were getting their faces eaten by aliens.

That was about 20 years after the Roswell incident, but you can see how the progression of scientific developments contributed to people’s ever-expanding imagination of what those scientific developments could lead to.  You remember what I said in the last book, about movie directors using establishing shots to plant an idea in your consciousness that they’re going to build upon later on?  If the heroine in a movie walks past a blender in a horror movie, the villain is probably about to cut her face off with it.  But if you’re watching a romantic comedy, it probably means her cute little four-year-old is about to splatter tomatoes all over the kitchen with it.
In 1947, even a rancher in New Mexico would’ve heard of the idea of intelligent space-traveling aliens.  His cultural background had already planted the original idea in his consciousness, or at least, not far down into his subconsciousness.  All there was left was for someone to build upon that original idea.

Have you ever noticed that all the UFOs in America are always sighted near top-secret military bases?  Does that seem at all strange to anyone?

So who do you suppose would want to build upon the ideas that had already been planted in people’s minds?

But why the f*ck would the military want to go to all this hassle to fool one rancher?

Let’s go back to the civilian version of the story now…

The next thing we can look at is how information flowed among the people in the story.  Who told what to who when?  And what did each of those people do with the information they got?
In the entire story, there are only two people who got anywhere near the aliens who didn’t work directly for the government:  The rancher and the coroner.  The rancher had a wife and two children, and there might’ve been a few other people working at the coroner’s office who saw something.  So we’re talking about maybe 8 people in all.

It’s virtually inevitable that air force engineers could manufacture some materials that a rancher had never seen before, and use them to build a type of aircraft he’d never seen before—even if they put a lot of research and development into these things specifically for this purpose.  Working as a theatrical set carpenter I make stuff no one has ever seen before every day of the week, so I’m sure air force engineers could figure out that trick too.  I also make simple things look like much more complicated things—like, making a water pump and some styrofoam look like a lovely waterfall trickling down over some rocks.  So again, I’m sure that air force engineers working on a top-secret base could figure out how to do my job.

Fooling one rancher who discovered a crash site in the middle of the night should not have been difficult.  Fooling him and his family and the town sheriff when they went back the next morning shouldn’t even have been terribly difficult.  But the people who staged this ruse couldn’t keep it up forever.  But they didn’t have to.  They convinced a few people they’d seen something—that is, built upon the pre-existing ideas in the people’s minds, showed them something tangible to reinforce those ideas, and got them to make strong emotional connections to them.  Then they disposed of all the evidence.  But they kept up the act of trying to hide something extremely important.  They gave everyone a lot of circumstantial evidence to go with the ideas that were being spread from a few people who had made strong emotional attachments to the idea that they’d seen a certain thing, and then they stood back and let the public try to fit the pieces together.

The fact that the air force doctors ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets from the town mortuary doesn’t indicate anything.  It seems to indicate that the military doctors wanted to preserve the bodies of five child-sized dead people, because those are the first ideas that doctors ordering five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets pulls out of people’s subconsciousness.  In the same way, if you see a gray rock-shaped thing, the idea it pulls out of your subconsciousness is “a rock”, not “a carved piece of styrofoam”.  “Someone ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets” pulls the “five dead child-sized people that he wants to preserve” idea out of your subconsciousness.  So you combine that with the “mysterious crash site nearby” idea that you already have in your consciousness, and the “they don’t want us to know what’s going on” idea.  That creates a “must be important” idea, followed by a “I wonder what it is” idea.  And then you try to fit all those ideas together to create an understanding of the situation.  At no point does the “he’s going to stick them in his basement and let them gather dust for the rest of his life” idea ever enter your consciousness.

Likewise for nine cargo planes landing in the airforce base, being loaded with cargo no one was allowed to see, and then taking off again.  That doesn’t prove anything either.  All they did was to give you some more circumstantial evidence to try to combine with everything else you thought you’d seen.

Did all of those air force nurses who said they’d conducted autopsies on aliens really get killed in suspicious accidents soon afterwards?  Or did they just spread some more information that suspicious people believed and gobbled up and then got put in some kind of witness protection program?  For that matter, were they really nurses at all, or were they CIA agents?

You remember what I said about space-travel science fiction taking off in the ‘60s, after John Glenn landed on the moon?  By the early ‘80s we were watching Star Trek movies.  Then people started coming out with investigative books about the Roswell conspiracy.  Then there were TV shows, movies, fictionalized TV shows, fictionalized movies…  And all these commercialized media accounts are made for the purpose of making as much money as possible, by appealing emotionally to the people with the most money.  We’re no longer talking about science.  Now we’re talking about art.  The Roswell conspiracy was once a conspiracy, but now it’s just a legend.  A demand was created to feel like all the events there fit together somehow, and now lots of people are making lots of money by supplying for that demand.  The air force officials gave everyone a little bit of circumstantial evidence to start with, and the public did the rest.

By 1997, a lot of people felt like their must be aliens out there in the universe somewhere.  They felt a connection to something greater and more powerful than themselves that lived somewhere far away.  Most of these people didn’t understand the vastness of universe, how long it takes to travel through that vastness even at the speed of light, or how thinly intelligent space traveling alien life must be spread.  And even if you tried to explain this to them, what do you think they would’ve said?  “Well, that’s what you think, but I feel it must be true.”   A few people have even told me that.

Basically, by this point the Roswell legend had become a religion.

So what more could anyone add to it?  How about something that looked like a spacecraft that thousands of people would see?  If you could fly a space-ship-looking thing over a major city without it crashing, you wouldn’t have to dispose of any debris or prevent anyone from visiting the crash site or offer them any explanation at all.  At this point, all you have to do is to show them some fake rocks carved out of styrofoam—oops, I mean, something that looks like a spacecraft—and all the beliefs people have built up around the original myth will take care of the rest.

So now that we’ve seen how information has flowed among people and shaped their perceptions of the situation, now let’s look at how people are acting upon that information.

What are people doing now?  Looking for UFOs.  Putting Roswell aliens on T-shirts and coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers.  In short, so many people believe that aliens exist that they react emotionally to the idea that they exist out there somewhere as if they really did exist out there somewhere.  We have a whole culture of people who believe in aliens without any physical evidence to prove they exist, who read meaning into circumstantial evidence, and who ignore the physical evidence we do have about the universe in favor of the emotional attachments they’ve made to something they imagine.  It’s as if the director of the CIA collaborated with Walt Disney to invent a new religion.

And what else is happening now as a result of the Roswell incident?  Every top secret military base in the desert has a psychological wall around it now, where anyone who sees anything strange flying through the air automatically assumes it’s an alien spacecraft and goes spreading disinformation everywhere they go.  Either that, or when they start asking what’s going on the military officials make a bunch of flimsy excuses about weather balloons, and lots of other people assume that must prove it was a UFO. Then when people try to fit all the pieces of information together to understand the situation, the understanding they arrive at has nothing at all to do with top secret military experiments, in spite of the fact that all of these UFOs have been sighted above top secret military bases!  For all intents and purposes, the military’s top-secret research has been rendered completely invisible.

Admittedly, there are a lot of people who have researched the Roswell incident a lot more thoroughly than I have, and the story of what happened varies according to whose website you visit. But no matter which version of the story you read, they all have the same fundamental things in common:  A few people saw something, they didn’t get to keep any physical evidence of it, and a whole lot of people who work for the government gave people various pieces of circumstantial or unverifiable evidence.   Just look at how the story stacks up against what we know about the universe, and then compare that to who was involved in the event, how information flowed among them, how that information shaped their perception of the situation, how they acted upon their perceptions, and who benefited as a result.  It doesn’t matter what version of the story you read.  They’re all just variations on the same theme.

When you assemble all of the evidence—not just the evidence that seems directly related—see how it all fits together, and then look at what it indicates, what it indicates is that a lot of people have gone looking for a Roswell conspiracy, and walked into a trap.  They only found the conspiracy the conspirators wanted them to find.  The real conspiracy was the military acting like they were conspiring to cover up an event, and letting the public feel like they’d outsmarted the conspirators, so the public would never notice what the conspirators were really trying to keep secret.  The conspirators wove some basic elements of psychology together and manufactured an illusion.

I don’t mean to be a drag.  I don’t really give a f*ck what happened at Roswell.  I was getting you warmed up for the next section…

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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That was then.  This is now.  Back in 1947 it was really easy to control the flow of information through society.  Now we have the internet.

I’ll tell you about chaos and systems theory in the next chapter, but for now here’s a basic idea of how it applies to conspiracies.

To pull off a conspiracy, you have to figure out which variables in a situation you can control and how to work around the variables you can’t control so that no matter what happens with them they won’t foil your plans.

There are very few variables in a conspiracy that can’t be controlled.  The weather is one.

Each person involved in the events of a conspiracy is a variable.  So are the results of those people interacting with each other in groups.  So are events in foreign countries.  But all of those can be controlled—at least, to some extent.  Then you just have to plan around the rest.

If you can get 8 or 9 people in a small ranching town out in the remote desert to say they saw something right after a certain event happened, back in the ‘40s, it doesn’t really matter if they change their minds afterwards.  They’re not going to be able to tell many people.  Even if they can find a way to tell a lot of people, it will take so long that by then a lot of people will have made strong emotional attachments to what they said at first.  And since they didn’t have any physical proof before and they still don’t have any physical proof now, why should anyone want to abandon their first impressions?

Knowing what you know now about how to plot a conspiracy, how would you pull off something like the Roswell incident in the middle of a major U.S. city in broad daylight?

Start at the beginning.  Who’s going to be involved?  How is information going to flow among people?  How will that information shape people’s perceptions?  How will people then act upon their perceptions?

Now suppose you’re in your 40s or 50s.  You were at least in your 30s when the internet went public.  The internet was never a part of your childhood development.  But it’s been a part of a lot of people’s childhood development since then.

Are you sure you know how many people are going to be involved?  And are you sure you know how information is going to flow among people?

After September 11th, a lot of people got on the internet to try to find out what had happened.  And then they started spreading their discoveries around the internet…

Three film students in their early to mid 20s, who had grown up in the age of the internet, compiled a lot of news footage and produced their own movie, which they called Loose Change.  Then they distributed it around the internet for free.  So many other people have produced movies and other projects I can’t even tell you about them all, but if you Google search for “9/11 Truth Movement” you won’t have to look very far.

Here’s the basic story of Loose Change.  As usual, this is just a condensed version.  If you want to learn more, go watch the movie yourself.

What did we learn from the Roswell conspiracy?  First you have to make people think they saw what you wanted them to see.  Then you have to get them to tell other people.  Then you get rid of the evidence so nobody can prove anything.  Now you leave everyone on their own to believe whatever they feel to be true.  You’re letting them assemble the pieces they have to try to make sense of the situation.  The pieces they have are their memories of some strange things they saw, a lot of emotional communication from other people, and no physical evidence.  You can turn a top-secret research facility completely invisible that way.

This time around there are going to be a lot more people involved.  So you have to give them very powerful, shocking imagery.  You have to get them to use a lot of very powerful emotional communication.  You have to make a strong first impression on them, and then get them to make strong first impressions on lots of other people.  That way, by the time everyone comes to their senses and starts thinking rationally again, the damage will already have been done.  The emotional impacts on people will already have been made.

This is basically what I do for a living.  If you walk into a room and see a picturesque waterfall in the middle of it, you’re going to react emotionally to what you see—or rather, what you think you see.  If you discover later that the waterfall is made out of styrofoam, that won’t erase the emotional effect your first impression made on you.  Whatever you remember about the waterfall afterwards, your first impression is going to be a big part of it.

You can’t predict what individual people will do, but you can plan around what they’ll do as a group.  The strongest emotional impact you could have on a group of people is panic.  That would also create the strongest emotional impact they could have on other people through their emotional communication.  And the best way to get a whole lot of people to panic is to completely unexpectedly make them all witness a gigantic amount of death and destruction.

If you can make everyone witness something really horrific, you can put everyone into a state of shock.  Lots of people will be saying lots of different things.  If you get so many people to say so many different things that the people who are hearing about the event second hand get completely overwhelmed by it, those overwhelmed people will have too much information to fit all the individual pieces together.  They’ll fit together the pieces that stick out most in their minds.  So as long as you can get most of the people to see what you want them to see, and consequently get them all to say the same basic things, and everyone is in a state of shock, the people who are listening to their versions of the story will remember best the things they hear from the most people, and will disregard the few people who said something different, thinking they were just confused because of being in shock.

You’re creating information packages in other people’s minds by making sure the information you want them to use in forming their perception of the situation is the information that gets repeated the most.  You’re also creating anti-information packages by making sure only a few people say anything different.  The audience will then connect the fact that these people are saying something different from everyone else with the fact that they’re in shock.  Their being in shock will seem to correspond with the fact that they’re saying something different from everyone else, and the audience will ignore what they said.  It won’t matter that the majority of people who agree with each other were also in shock, because their being in shock won’t seem to fit with the fact that they all agreed with each other.  So the audience will connect the fact that they all agreed with each other with the words they were saying, and will ignore the fact that they were all in shock.

The weakest link in the public’s perception of the events is their emotional reaction to it.  As long as you can pull a strong enough emotional reaction out of enough people, nothing else matters.  If you make a strong emotional impression on all the witnesses, and get them to use strong emotional communication when telling other people, and make sure they tell everyone, and then dispose of the evidence, the game’s over.  You could pull off the Roswell incident in broad daylight in the middle of Times Square.

Almost…

Enter the Loose Change crew.  They’re internet kids.  They compiled thousands of hours of footage that was loose in the internet, shifted through it, pulled out all the accounts of the witnesses who saw something different from what most people saw, but who all saw the same things as each other.

Now the tables were turned.  Now those few people who saw something different from what most people saw, and—more importantly—that was different from the consensus the public had reached on what had happened that day, didn’t seem to be in such a state of shock any more.
Then the Loose Change crew started studying the actual size of the universe—or in this case, what we know about the world that exists outside the immediate story and is related to the events less directly.  And guess what.  The indirectly related physical evidence corresponds to what the few witnesses most people had ignored had to say.  And since all the directly related physical evidence had been disposed of, the actual size of the universe and other indirectly related physical evidence is now the best anyone has to work with.

So they made their movie and counterattacked.

They present about two hours of evidence for their case.  Even so, they had to choose what fraction of the evidence they found that they were going to present.  Now I’m having to choose which fraction of their fraction to present, to try to keep this as simple as I can.  There is a lot of debate surrounding the 9/11 attacks, and I’m trying to keep from getting sucked into it.  Maybe the Loose Change kids really did unravel a conspiracy, and maybe the fact that they were able to find two hours worth of evidence out of the thousands of hours of evidence they sorted through only proves they wanted to unravel a conspiracy.  What I’m doing here is combining their movie with evolutionary psychology as an example of how to unravel a conspiracy in as few steps as possible, by knowing how to study the evidence objectively—as opposed to forming your understanding of the situation based on circumstantial evidence you saw while in a state of shock and surrounded by people who were panicking.

If you want to learn more, watching their movie is a good next step.  And if you do, watch how information flowed among people in the aftermath of the attack, how it formed people’s perceptions of the situation, and how people acted upon their perceptions.  Knowing what I know about physics and human behavior, their movie took on a whole new dimension that they weren’t expecting.  Or rather, a whole new dimension that they were trying to create but couldn’t quite figure out how.

First, let’s start with the story of the attacks that we were told on the news.  The official story that everyone keeps repeating now.

Nineteen terrorists boarded four airliners on September 11th and hijacked them with box cutters and by saying they were carrying bombs.  They killed the pilots and flew the planes themselves.

Then, in New York, two of the airliners came swooping out of the sky and crashed into the World Trade Center.  The heat from all that jet fuel was so intense that it melted the steel girders in both the towers.  The weight of the top 20 floors being dropped on the floors below them was more than the weight of the steel girders below could hold up, and both of the towers came crashing down.

In Washington D.C. one of the airliners came swooping out of the sky and slammed into the Pentagon.  The jet fuel there burned with such intense heat that the entire airliner was vaporized.

Then, somewhere over Pennsylvania, the passengers tried to counter-hijack the fourth airliner.  They kept it from being crashed into a building, but the plane went down anyway, and crashed into a mine.  This one also burned with such intense heat that the entire plane was vaporized.  Now we remember the passengers of Flight 93 as heroes.

I’ve just got one little question here.  How exactly do you make jet fuel burn with such intense heat that it completely vaporizes an entire airplane, including the engines?  I mean, aren’t jet engines specifically designed for burning jet fuel in?  Right at this very moment, and at every minute of the day or night, there are hundreds of airliners flying over America. Those jet engines aren’t getting vaporized.  They aren’t even getting slightly melted.  They’re all working just fine.

Let’s tug on that loose thread a little more.  Have any jet liners ever crashed before and burned with such intense heat that they completely vaporized?  According to the Loose Change crew and all their research, the answer is no.

The plane that crashed into the Pentagon burned with such intense heat that the bodies of everyone inside were completely vaporized.  But out of the 189 people working in the Pentagon who were killed, 184 of their bodies were identifiable.  The other 5 bodies were recovered.  None of them were vaporized, or anything close.  You might be tempted to think that the fire must’ve burned hotter inside the airplane, because all those people were surrounded by metal and the airplane was carrying all that fuel.  The first problem with that is that airplanes don’t carry their fuel in the passenger cabin, they carry their fuel in their wings.  The second problem is that the fuel burned with such intense heat that it vaporized not only all the people inside the airplane, but also the plane itself.  So this fire burned with such intense heat that it vaporized metal—including the jet engines themselves—but not hot enough to vaporize the flesh of the people in the building?

You can look up photos of numerous airline crashes on the internet.  In every one of them you’ll see the same two basic things:  Lots of debris strewn everywhere, and a huge swath of scorched earth.  You can look up photos of the Pentagon crash on the internet.  Somehow the lawn outside the Pentagon survived perfectly intact, apart from being a little singed right outside the hole.  And that’s in spite of the fact that, according to the report anyway, the airliner hit the lawn and bounced off it before it crashed into the building.  So at best, the report is mistaken and the pilot scored a direct hit on the wall of the Pentagon.

Something else you’ll notice if you look at internet photos of the Pentagon from before the roof collapsed is that the airliner made a roundish hole in the wall of the building.  A cross-section of an airplane isn’t round; it’s round with two huge wings sticking out of the sides and a vertical stabilizer sticking out of the top.  And not only that, the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon was carrying a 6-ton jet engine made of steel and titanium alloy on each wing, which hit the Pentagon at over 500 miles per hour.  If you look closer at the photos, you’ll see five large cable spools sitting near the hole, as though they’d been rolled out there by some electrical power workers who were going to be setting up some new lights outside the building or something.  The spool right in front of the hole is knocked over, but the other four, sitting just to the right of it, are still sitting neatly beside each other, up on edge.  So this is another clue that no airplane wing skidded across the front lawn of the Pentagon at 500 miles per hour.

And if you look at the photo even closer, you’ll notice that the glass in several of the windows around the hole is still perfectly intact.  So not only did two 6-ton steel and titanium jet engines hitting the building not make big holes of their own, they didn’t even break many of the windows.

The wings of the airliner ripped five light poles out of the ground outside the Pentagon.  It could be said that the light poles damaged the wings before the plane hit the building, so that the wings folded backwards and the whole plane fit into a round hole.  There are just a few problems with that argument.

First of all, it still doesn’t explain why the vertical stabilizer would’ve fit neatly into the round hole.

Second, if the light poles could’ve damaged the wings that badly, the wings should’ve spewed jet fuel all over the lawn, and the fire from the building should’ve set the lawn on fire.

Third, an airplane without wings is no longer an aircraft.  It’s a projectile.  I am a pilot, remember.  If the wings had been damaged that badly, how did the pilot still manage to score a direct hit on the wall of the building?  It could be said that the momentum of a 100-ton airplane moving at 500 miles per hour would’ve had more than enough momentum to carry it into the building after losing its wings.  I’m not disputing that.  But there’s no way the pilot could’ve anticipated how five light poles ripping his wings off would affect the flight path of the airplane.  Obviously there’s no way he could’ve practiced that maneuver ahead of time.  So there was no way he could’ve planned how to fly at the Pentagon, get his wings ripped off somewhere along the way, and still make a direct hit on the wall, and there’s no way he could’ve adjusted his course after losing his wings, in order to make a direct hit.

There was a little bit of airplane wreckage discovered at the crash site.  There were three large pieces and a lot of smaller pieces.  Two of the large pieces were parts of engines.  Various airplane engineers have looked at the photos and said they’re not parts of Boeing 757 engines.  But I’m no airplane engineer, so I just have to take their word for it.

The third large piece of airplane wreckage was a piece of the body.  It’s a twisted scrap of metal, with part of the airline’s logo on it.  It was found sitting on the lawn of the Pentagon.  Lots of photographers took pictures of it.  I’m sure you can find those photos all over the internet.

The paint on the metal is still perfectly white.  There are no scratches on it anywhere, nor burn marks or even a single smudge of soot from the airplane-engine-vaporizing superinferno that engulfed the rest of the plane.

I remember hearing about this on the day of the attack.  I’m sure someone could say that there was a miscommunication and the news reporters were mistakenly informed that the airplane had vaporized, when in fact the wreckage was removed very quickly because the Pentagon was such an important building.  But the Loose Change kids show photos in the movie of the hole in the wall of the Pentagon before the roof above it collapsed, and there isn’t any airplane wreckage visible.  So anyone who claims that the press was misinformed and the wreckage was cleared away very quickly, is claiming that the entire airplane, minus a few bits and pieces, was removed from the building while the building was still on fire.

The Pentagon isn’t just any old building; it’s command central for our entire military.  So it’s built to withstand attacks.

The Pentagon is also a gigantic building.  Gigantic buildings are always an architectural challenge, because they have to be ventilated.  And I have been trained as an architect.  Unless you want the inside of your building to feel like a dungeon, you have to figure out how to get a lot of sunlight into it.  So basically, the challenge is how to squeeze a lot of floor space into a gigantic building, but put most of the rooms on outside walls so you can put windows in them.

At the college I went to, the main building was a huge building.  If they’d built it as a square or rectangle, unless the rooms were really huge—which things like dorm rooms and offices aren’t—most of the rooms of the building would’ve been on the inside, with no exterior walls, and therefore, no windows.  So instead, the building was a big E shape, with courtyards between the wings.  They spread the building out a little more while still keeping it fairly compact, and all the rooms got windows that way.

In the Pentagon they use numerous concentric rings, with courtyards between them.  Then the rings are connected at various places by perpendicular sections that radiate out from the center like the spokes of a wheel.

The plane that hit the Pentagon crashed into the first ring, out the other side, and into the wall of the next ring.  In all, the nose of the plane penetrated 9 feet of steel reinforced concrete.  Granted, the plane was going over 500 miles per hour, but the nose of a plane is pretty lightweight, because it’s designed to penetrate air—not steel reinforced concrete!   Usually when a commercial airliner crashes the nose cone is completely demolished. And if all that jet fuel burned in the outermost ring of the Pentagon and vaporized the entire plane, how did the nose cone of the plane cross the courtyard and break through the wall of the next ring of the building?  What vaporized that part of the plane?

Speaking as a commercial pilot, I have a couple more things to add.  First of all, this pilot had never flown a jetliner before.  For him to get that direct a hit on that small of a target with that big of a plane, after getting his wings ripped off, would be, at best, miraculous.

Second, the flight standards for a commercial helicopter pilot require me to stay within 50 feet of my stated altitude, and to land my helicopter within 50 feet of my stated landing spot.  Airplane pilots have a lot more leeway on their landing distance, because they’re flying their approach to a long runway, while I have to be able to land on a small helipad.  These were the requirements for me to pass my commercial pilot’s license test.  They have to give pilots that margin of error, because basically, that’s how unpredictable the air is.  My point is, just about anything could’ve put him 50 feet off his target, even without his wings getting ripped off.  For someone who was trained as an airline pilot and didn’t get his wings cut off, making that perfect of a hit still would’ve been hard.

And third, for someone who hated Americans and wanted to fly an airliner into the Pentagon, the pilot picked about the worst possible way to do it.  He hit the first floor of the outermost ring perpendicularly.  I’ve never been to the Pentagon, but I would have to guess that the first floor of the outermost ring is where the people with the least important jobs work.  And hitting that required him to fly through five light poles and get his wings cut off.  If he’d really wanted to f*ck sh*t up, he could’ve flown in lengthwise to one of the five sides of the Pentagon and belly-flopped the airliner onto the roof of the innermost ring at 500 miles per hour.  Presumably, the top floor of the innermost ring is where the people with the most important jobs work.  I don’t know how well the roof of the Pentagon is fortified, but against a 100-ton plane going 500 miles per hour, it couldn’t be that well fortified.  And he wouldn’t’ve had to worry about losing control of the plane when he flew through all those light poles and got his wings torn off.  Or the pilot could’ve used the same approach he used, but waited another half second before starting his descent, flown over the part of the Pentagon he hit, brought the plane down on the inside, and made his broadside hit on one of the innermost rings.  Either way, the pilot could’ve ripped into the part of the Pentagon where a bunch of top-ranking generals worked and spewed shredded metal and burning jet fuel everywhere, but instead he chose to kill a few accountants and filing clerks.  So given the possibilities these evil mastermind terrorists had, after all the years of training and preparation they put into this attack, when it came to the part of the attack where they kill Americans, for some reason they decided to kill the smallest number possible of the least important people possible.

As I said, the Pentagon is the command central of our entire military.  That means a lot of people who have served in the military for a very long time work there.  The Loose Change gang show a lot of quotes that career officers working in the building made to reporters that they felt the explosion of a bomb and smelled cordite, which is a common military explosive.  Airliners crashing and bombs exploding don’t feel the same or sound the same, and burning jet fuel doesn’t smell like cordite.

The Pentagon is an office building. They don’t store huge amounts of explosives there.

Also, a number of people in buildings near the Pentagon said the explosion shook their buildings.  Explosions shake other buildings.  But airplanes crashing don’t cause explosions.  They shake the buildings they crash into.  And those big fireballs you see when they crash are mostly all their fuel burning at the same time.  Not the kind of thing career military officers think of when they think of explosives going off.  And not the kind of explosions that shake other buildings.   We’re basically talking about the difference between an M-80 firecracker and a Molotov cocktail, only much, much bigger.

Finally, there were a number of video cameras in the area that had the impact site in their field of vision.  There was a Department of Transportation camera watching traffic on a freeway, another at a hotel, and another at a gas station.  Within minutes of the impact, FBI agents were at each of those places.  They confiscated the tapes and warned everyone working there not to discuss what they had seen.  Those tapes have never been released to the public.

You remember back when people used to complain about security cameras being an invasion of their privacy?  All the law enforcement officials and FBI agents and everyone else who were installing the cameras always said the same thing:  “If you’re not breaking the law, what difference does it make if you’re being recorded on camera?  And if you do have a problem with being recorded on camera, what does that mean?”

Well, when you separate yourself from all the shock and panic everyone felt that day, forget about the official story we’ve been told, and look at what all the evidence indicates, the attack on the Pentagon is a whole new story.  The damage to the building is not consistent with an airline hitting it, and it is consistent with a cruise missile hitting it.

And now, if it was an airliner that hit the Pentagon, the FBI agents have it on video.  And if it wasn’t an airliner that hit the Pentagon, they have that on video.  So why don’t they want anyone to see the tapes?

The airline debris could’ve been hidden in the Pentagon at the crash site, so that when a missile hit that location, the airline debris would’ve been blown out of the building.
How do you make a cruise missile rip five light poles out of the ground?  Well, the force of the explosion springs to mind.

Flight 93 was basically a simpler version of the attack on the Pentagon.  For the second time in aviation history, and for the second time in one day, an airplane crashed without strewing wings and engines and fuselages and tail cones and bodies hither and yon, but landed in a neat little pile where the entire aircraft, including the engines, was almost completely vaporized by the jet fuel that had been powering the engines only moments before.  Without even scorching the grass.
You can find photos of the Pennsylvania crash site on the internet.  It looks like someone dug a ditch and dumped some scrap metal in it.  No bodies were recovered.

Now on to the main event:  The World Trade Center.

You can find videos all over the internet of the second airliner hitting the World Trade Center, and then of the buildings collapsing.

If you time the towers collapsing each of them takes about 10 seconds to drop.  As Galileo discovered, an object near the Earth falls at 32 feet per second per second.

Each of the towers was just over 1,360 feet tall.  If you were to stand on the roof of one of them and drop a cannon ball off the edge, like Galileo did at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it would take it about 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.  That means that if you dropped your cannon ball off the edge of the roof at the instant the tower began to collapse, you would hit the ground about one second after your cannon ball.  That 1,360 feet of steel between you and the ground meant basically nothing.

But then, maybe that’s how buildings collapse.  Maybe that’s what happens when you melt the steel underneath the top 20 floors and drop all their weight on the rest of the building.  I’m no demolitions engineer.

Neither were the Loose Change kids.  So they started reading through interviews with architects.
The World Trade Center’s construction manager, who is now a professor of civil engineering, was quoted by a reporter as saying the jet fuel burning at 2000º melted the steel, just like the official story said.

Another engineer was quoted as saying that all the steel in the World Trade Center was forged to established architectural standards for steel used in that application.  The building wouldn’t’ve been certified by architectural inspectors if it couldn’t withstand a temperature of 2000º for several hours.  Melting the steel that quickly would’ve required a temperature of 3000º.
The south tower was the second to be hit, and it burned for 56 minutes before it dropped.  The north tower took 103 minutes to drop.

If you watch the videos of the south tower being hit, you can see the north tower already burning where the airliner hit it.  That first airliner hit the side of the north tower dead center.  The second airliner hit the corner of the south tower.  You can see a huge orange fireball exploding out of the corner of the tower.  You know what that fireball is made of?  Jet fuel.  Jet fuel that’s burning up in the air outside the tower, instead of all over the steel on the inside of the tower.  And still, the north tower took almost twice as long to collapse.

Fire Chief Orio Palmer reached the fire on the 78th floor of the south tower.  He radioed the situation down to the fire crew on the ground.  The Loose Change kids got hold of the tape.
Chief Palmer’s words were:  “We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire.  We should be able to knock it down with two lines.”  The Fire Chief was standing right there looking at the fire that destroyed the south tower, and he ordered hoses to put it out with.  Not ten hoses.  Not twenty hoses.  He didn’t say, “Holy f*ck, look at all this molten steel dripping from the ceiling, we’d better get out of here while we still have the chance!”  Nope.  When a Chief of the New York City Fire Department stood looking at the fire in the south tower, the most effective means he could perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA was to spray the fire with just two fire hoses.

The two main towers of the World Trade Center were the first steel framed towers ever in history to collapse as a result of a fire.   But it wasn’t the first steel framed building ever to be hit by a large airplane.  It wasn’t even the first steel framed building in New York City to catch fire after being hit by a large airplane.

On July 28th, 1945, a B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.  14 people were killed, $1,000,000 in damages, but the fire was put out and the Empire State Building still stands to this day.

Later on September 11th, another building, World Trade Center 7, became the third steel framed building ever in history to collapse due to fire.  The official story says that falling debris from the World Trade Center started fires in that building that ignited several large fuel tanks.  Meaning that building wasn’t subjected to super-hot-burning jet fuel, but plain old boring diesel fuel.  Diesel fuel burns cooler than gasoline.  I have been an auto mechanic, you know.

A number of steel framed buildings have caught fire throughout history without being hit by jetliners, and even though they’d been built earlier and burned for longer, none of them ever collapsed.

Oh, and by the way, you know how everyone keeps saying the World Trade Center towers were steel-framed buildings?  Technically that’s true.  What they aren’t saying is that the steel frame of each building was built around six gigantic concrete pillars.  Concrete doesn’t melt.  Why would a detail like that just slip everybody’s mind?

So far, with information that’s publicly available on the internet, we can see that jet fuel burning at 2000º weakened the steel frames of buildings that could withstand temperatures of 2000º for several hours, even though one of the buildings burned for less than one hour and the other building burned for less than two hours.  The building that collapsed in less than one hour was exposed to less jet fuel than the building that burned for nearly twice that long before collapsing.  And somehow, all that weakened steel made the buildings collapse as though the central concrete pillars of the building weren’t even there.

What could do such a thing?

There were numerous statements made by witnesses and fire fighters in the World Trade Center towers that they heard a lot of explosions all over the building, in the basement and on various floors beneath the floors the airliners hit.  As though they were in the middle of a controlled demolition.

The week before, someone ordered all the bomb-sniffing dogs to be removed from the building.

There’s a lot more I could say about the movie, but I think I would just be beating a dead horse by this point.

If you step back from the event itself and look at how people’s emotions and perceptions of the effective preservation of their DNA affected the flow of the information, who had the means, motive, and opportunity to alter the flow of information, and whether or not the events comply with the laws of physics that govern the rest of the universe, you can see through the sensory illusion that a conspirator would need to weave to hide his conspiracy.

First, a whole lot of carnage and mayhem erupted on the streets of New York.  Then a lot of Capitalist news reporters started focusing on reporting the most exciting looking stuff—namely video footage of planes crashing into buildings, buildings collapsing, and terrified people running down the street.  Then television audiences all over the world paid the most attention the most exciting things they saw on the news.

Meanwhile there was a hole in the Pentagon and another hole in some field in Pennsylvania.  Those crash sites had some strange inconsistencies with every other airplane crash in history, but there wasn’t much else to see…

And now, back to terrified people running down the streets of New York!

From a strictly artistic standpoint—meaning the standpoint of people who make their livings by telling stories that have the greatest emotional impact on their audiences—the terrorist attacks were a play in three acts.  Act One:  Something bad happens that the audience finds personally meaningful.  (The first airliner hits the World Trade Center.)  Act Two:  It gets worse.  (The second airliner hits the World Trade Center and the third airliner hits the Pentagon.)  Act Three:  The goodguys win.  (The passengers on the fourth airliner fight the terrorists and prevent them from crashing the airliner into anyone else.)   But in order to carry the full weight of the tragedy from the beginning of the story to the ending and have the greatest possible tragic effect on the audience, the play has to end tragically even though the goodguys win.  (The heroes of the fourth airliner crash and are killed protecting innocent people.)

Then roll credits.  The September 11th attacks were over.  The story had been told.  All over America, government buildings and big terrorist targets were being evacuated.  As the day wore on, more and more people were glued to their TVs.

Then after credits, cut back to New York City.  World Trade Center 7 collapses.  No one was killed because the building had been evacuated.   What emotional impact is that going to have on audiences all over America?  The terrorists are still out there and are still a threat to America, but Americans are fighting back effectively now.  So get ready for a war, everyone.  We can win, but it won’t be easy.  The terrorists can strike at any time without warning.

Looking back on the terrorist attacks now, it was the perfect Hollywood formulaic plot.

And you remember what I said in the last book, about Hollywood movies being made for middle class Americans who have minimal understandings of physics?

Now that this Hollywood tragedy has played out in real life, right here in our midsts, buildings have been destroyed, thousands of people have been killed, and carnage and mayhem have been broadcast all over the world, what happens next?

Well, as George Orwell said, war is the ultimate form of political stabilizer.  We all felt that America was under attack, so we all banded together to protect ourselves.  We all set aside our differences, rallied around President Bush, and got ready for a fight.  To help us win the fight, we had to trust each other and streamline our society so we could work together as efficiently as possible.  So we set up the Department of Homeland Security and passed the Patriot act and started putting American flag bumper stickers on our cars.

When a person’s friend or family member gets killed, they go through a lot of emotional suffering.  To work their way out of it, they have to find a way to put together everything they know that they feel was relevant to the situation.  Once they’ve done that, it’s considered extremely impolite for anyone else to question if that’s really how the people died, or if these bereaved people are mistaken.  And now a whole lot of people’s friends and family members had not only died but been murdered.   So now everyone in America has been prevented from asking if there was anything more to their deaths than what met the eye, just out of simple common courtesy.

Now a whole lot of people feel like their country has been attacked.  People start saying things like, “If you don’t agree with the president, you must be a terrorist.”  They start throwing words around like God and patriotism.  Now who’s going to dare to disagree with that?  If you do disagree you’re in the minority, and you seem to be in an even greater minority because a lot of people who agree with you don’t dare to make it known.

Ultimately, the public is going to believe whatever is easiest for them to believe. And “the public” is made up of the proverbial masses, that majority of people who create the sociological forces that move our country in one direction or another.  Disagree with them at your own risk.

The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity comes in handy here.  Everyone in America had some sort of personal history and cultural background before 9/11.  Everyone had various combinations of skills, abilities, and resources.  Everyone had survival and reproductive instincts, the abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate, and their eight basic motivations.  All anyone needed to do was to make light waves, sound waves, and other forms of matter and energy move around in ways that made a lot of people feel extremely threatened.  Everyone didn’t agree with everyone else, but everyone felt like America was under attack and they might be the next to be killed, so everyone acting on what they individually believed to be true pushed America very hard in a general direction at least.  To put it another way, everyone’s spiritual vectors were strongly affected by 9/11, and we all ended up with a lot of vectors pointing in the same direction, so that’s the direction we made America move, even if none of us got exactly what we wanted.

After 9/11, everyone wondered what the hell happened.  So each person put together the pieces as best they could to create an understanding of the situation.  Based on their two instincts, three components of intellect, eight motivations, and abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background, each person went into the situation believing certain things to be true.  That is, each person started with an information package.  No one’s information package was identical to anyone else’s, but all of them—or at least most of them—had a few basic things in common.  Things like “Americans are good” and “terrorists are bad”.

That basic “Americans are good and terrorists are bad” belief made it really easy for people to believe that terrorists had attacked America, and really hard for them to believe that Americans had attacked America.  So they went looking for evidence that supported their belief that terrorists attacked America.  And they didn’t have to look far, because they saw a whole lot of really obvious signs that terrorists had attacked.  There were videos of an airliner crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center, videos of the towers collapsing, news footage of the Pentagon on fire, news footage of New York streets full of wreckage and debris, interviews with terrified witnesses all covered in soot and dust.

So just like people who’d lost friends and family, everyone put together the pieces to try to understand the situation.  They felt like their country had been attacked, and now they felt like they understood how and why.  So for anyone to suggest that everyone might be mistaken would be considered terribly impolite.

So everyone accepted that jet fuel had melted the steel framing of the World Trade Center and caused it to collapse.  Everyone accepted that the fires in the Pentagon and the abandoned mine had been so hot that there was hardly any wreckage found of the airliners.  This was all perfectly obvious, because it fit so well with everyone’s belief that Americans are good and terrorists are bad.

At this point we’re talking about psychological warfare.  And if we’re talking about psychological warfare, then my next guest on the panel has to be Captain Eric H. May of Ghost Troop.

Captain May is a retired army Captain.  He worked with weapons of mass destruction and later in intelligence.  He’s also a genius at language.

So he’s been seeing psychological warfare tactics being used by the government against the American people everywhere he looks—because that’s what he’s trained in.  It started with the Battle of Baghdad, when reporters got so caught up in the Jessica Lynch story.  Private Lynch got captured, was taken hostage, and then was rescued by the Special Forces.  It was another perfect Hollywood story, and Captain May recognized that in his own way.  Think about it.  Act I:  Something bad happens—her convoy gets ambushed.  Act II:  It gets worse—she gets taken hostage.  Act III:  The goodguys win—she gets rescued.

Captain May could see the writing on the wall.  There was a gigantic battle going on, and now that reporters were so caught up in this heart-warming human-interest story, they weren’t covering the battle.  And that meant the American media was getting flooded with the heart-warming human-interest story, and the huge battle that was going on meanwhile seemed to be something that was just happening in the background.

How did the huge battle turn out?  We won, obviously, because the Americans took Baghdad.  But how big of a battle was it, exactly?  How bloody?  We all assume that it ended happily, because the goodguys won, but that’s because all we ever heard about the Battle of Baghdad was the Jessica Lynch story.

According to Captain May and all his connections, the entire 7th Cavalry got wiped out.  Again.  The 7th Cavalry was General Custer’s old unit, which got slaughtered by the Lakota (“Sioux”) and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

This alone should tell you something about how the Battle of Baghdad must’ve gone.  We’ve got a cowboy for president, and the Battle of Baghdad should’ve been the climax of the Iraq war to that point—you know, capturing their capitol city and all of that.  Sending in the 7th Cavalry to do the job was the beginning to what should’ve been another perfect Hollywood script.  There were only two possibilities:  Either they win, or they lose.  If they win, General Custer finally has his day.  If they lose, they heroically fight a desperate battle, in the tradition of General Custer.

So there we were, with the 7th Cavalry riding into the badguys’ capitol city.  So why did it get almost completely covered over with the story of some chick getting captured and rescued?   How badly could the battle have possibly gone?

So Captain May formed Ghost Troop, with a bunch of other retired military and law enforcement personnel.  It was obvious that an information war was being waged against Americans, so they started fighting back.  They have their ways of collecting information and recognizing events on the horizon.  Then they warn law enforcement officials in the area, to make sure they find out, so they can prevent attacks from taking place.  In so doing, they prevent the media from seizing upon the events, broadcasting them all over the world, shaping people’s perceptions, and consequently getting people to do exactly what the conspirators wanted them to do.

The idea is that if they can intercept the next 9/11, they can keep the War on Terror from escalating.  Even if the 9/11 attacks were carried out entirely by our own government, our entire government can’t possibly be in on the conspiracy.  So if Ghost Troop finds out about a looming conspiracy and warns the local law enforcement before events start unfolding according to the conspirators’ plans, or before the conspirators can give orders to the unsuspecting law enforcement officials, they can put events into motion that will stop the conspiracy—like, getting the police to arrest an undercover CIA agent who wasn’t expecting them to be waiting for him in the building he’d just broken into and who can’t afford to blow his cover by telling them he works for the government.  Or whatever.

Explaining exactly what Captain May and Ghost troop do would take a hell of a long time.  My point is, having shown you what three kids fresh out of college were able to find out on the internet, you can just imagine what 300 people who each had 20 years of experience at doing this could find out.

You might be tempted to ask if Ghost Troop can do what the Loose Change kids did, but 1000 times better, why haven’t they had 1000 times more impact on America?  Well, for one, they’re intelligence agents, not movie directors, so what they do is a whole lot less visible to the public.  The other is that being 1,000 times better at intelligence gathering than the Loose Change kids still doesn’t change the fact that Ghost Troop is outnumbered by the American public by 1,000,000 to 1.  300 people with valuable information can only do so much when they’re surrounded by 300,000,000 people who are kept so blissfully ignorant by mainstream media that’s easy to understand.

Here’s one example of what Captain May and Ghost Troop do that’s pretty simple to understand.  These are Captain May’s own words, from his interview with W. Leon Smith, of the Lone Star Iconoclast.  You can read the full interview online.

There are natural cycles with the code. For instance, the Illuminati are freaks for master numbers, 11, 22, and 33. There’s a cycle that leads up to certain pivotal dates, like the most recent for us was 8-8, which was a really 8-8-8 since the year numbers of 2006 add up to a hidden 8. People say “it couldn’t be true,” but they’re not remembering that coding has already been proven true. Last year it was the 7-7 London bombings, which were really 7-7-7, since the year numbers [2005] add up to 7. It’s obvious that someone – whether you think it’s the government as we do or al Qaeda as the government wants you to – is using number/date codes. The coded event that opened my eyes was the Madrid bombing of 3/11/2004. Lots of military intelligence folks picked up on the “coincidences” of Madrid. The first was that 9/11 and 3/11 are “harmonics” of the same numbers, with the 11’s matching and the 9 and 3 being the square and square root of each other. The second was that there were exactly 911 days between the two events! The odds against that kind of “coincidence” are astronomical, and most of the other “terror” events carry the same coding. In addition to the 9/11 and 3/11 attacks, we had a 7/7 London attack in 2005 and a 7/11 Mumbai attack a year later. The two events could be numerically represented as “77″ and 7 x 11 (which equals 77). We’ve even had a 9/11 backwards with the 11/9 bombing of Amman, Jordan in 2005. The embedded code runs through all these events, and the media occasionally mentions that there seems to be some kind of “al Qaeda code,” although they never investigate that code, as it would lead back to the Bush administration.

Captain May has a lot of stuff like this posted on the net.  If you read it, at first he seems like some kind of wacko.  But remember, dear reader, that you are reading the third volume of my book.  It’s easy to assume Captain May must be a wacko, because he knows about a lot of stuff you’ve never heard of.  So when he talks about what he knows as though it’s true, because he knows it’s true, it sounds to you like he’s just imagining it all.  I get that all the time.

I don’t usually get involved in conspiracy theories.  A lot of conspiracy theorists get wrapped up in trying to prove who said what to who when and why.  A lot of them are based on circumstantial evidence and assumptions about people’s motives.  It’s a good thing some people try tracking down conspiracies though, because if no one did, people would be pulling off conspiracies everywhere you looked— except you wouldn’t realize it.  Conspiracy theorists at least are doing something to prevent conspiracies, because if it weren’t for conspiracy theorists, people would have no reason not to plot conspiracies.

On the other hand, a lot of conspiracy theory-ism seems to be a competition for social status among geeks more than a counterbalance to conspirators.  It seems like every time anything big and important happens, someone comes running along claiming to have proof that it’s a conspiracy.  But do they really?  Or are they just cashing in on an opportunity to attract attention to themselves?

Loose Change is a good introduction to the idea that a conspiracy could be afoot.  After all, the first step in unraveling a conspiracy is for people to start looking for a conspiracy.  The Loose Change kids and Captain May and Ghost Troop in their own ways, present a dissenting body of evidence to the story the pubic has been told, and thereby give people the choice in what to believe.  Do you want to believe the version of the story where jet fuel can vaporize its own engines, or the version where jet fuel can’t vaporize its own engines?

Once you give people the choice in what to believe, you’ve already started to counteract the conspiracy, because now instead of the public believing exactly what the conspirators wanted them to believe and doing exactly what the conspirators wanted them to do, they’ll start believing and doing things other than what the conspirators wanted them to.  Inevitably, whatever decisions the public makes after that will be worse for the conspirators, and therefore, better for the public.

And now, for my final guest on the panel, Detective Michael Ruppert, formerly of the narcotics division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Detective Ruppert is now an investigative reporter.  His book on the 9/11 conspiracy is called Crossing the Rubicon—The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, and it’s basically the 100 hour version of Loose Change.   He doesn’t f*ck around with mysterious code numbers or even with physics the public can misunderstand.  As a detective, he’s trained to find clues, assemble bodies of evidence, form and test hypotheses, and prove who had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit crimes.

I talk about politicians as though they’re morons to show how everything that’s going wrong could be happening by accident.  From there, the only choice politicians have is to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.  If they aren’t morons who are f*cking everything up out of complete incompetence, then they must be f*cking everything up on purpose.

I won’t bother trying to present a condensed version of Detective Ruppert’s case here, because without walking you through the evidence step by step, the conclusions sound too far-fetched.   If you are interested in that, go read his book.  All I need to tell you about is the science he presents as a background for his case in the first chapter of his book.  You already know all the science.  Now watch how the pieces fit together…

Consider these two possibilities:

Possibility #1:

Politicians are morons.

They have completely ignored the environmental crisis.

They have expended no effort to try to educate the public about it, out of incompetence.

In spite of the U.S. government’s 200-fold increase of the budget for fighting the War on Drugs over the course of 30 years, drugs on the streets of America are now cheaper, more plentiful, and more pure than they were when President Nixon began the War on Drugs in 1972, which means that by all measures our best and brightest politicians and law enforcement officials are being utterly defeated.

Globalization is turning into an economic and environmental disaster for a lot of people due to incompetence and mismanagement.

Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion to the present day, has turned into a political disaster for everyone involved, due to incompetence and mismanagement.

The United States’ assistance of Russia’s transition from Communism to Capitalism led to the economic pillaging of the country by foreign investors, due to incompetence and mismanagement.

Al Qaeda was able to attack the United States and the United States responded with the War on Terror and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, due to incompetence and mismanagement by American politicians.

The energy crisis has been caused by incompetence and mismanagement.

Possibility #2:

Politicians are very good at getting people to do what they want, and some politicians are very good at keeping people from even realizing politicians are getting them to do what they want.

Politicians have paid close attention to the human predicament.

They’ve expended no effort to educate the public about it precisely so that its counterintuitive causes will prevent the public from figuring out what’s going wrong with the world.

The War on Drugs is proceeding precisely according to plan, because it is militarizing American society, making a lot of people distrustful of each other, and acclimating the American public to the idea of a war that must be fought for the sake of fighting it, even though we aren’t winning.  It also turns a net profit for the government in the world’s biggest underground economy, to offset the effects of exponential growth and thermodynamics running down the global economy by spreading ever-diminishing resources among an ever-increasing population.

Globalization is proceeding precisely according to plan, and it’s turning into an economic and environmental disaster for a lot of people.

Events in Afghanistan have been unfolding precisely according to plan ever since the Soviet invasion, because the war was a major contributor to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and it gave the U.S. government the opportunity to train and radicalize a fighting force that could threaten a military superpower.

The United States’ assistance of Russia’s transition from Communism to Capitalism led to the economic pillaging of Russia, precisely according to plan, which eliminated the Russians’ economic ability to continue as a military superpower, or to support the European Union as a military superpower.

Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States and the United State’s response with the War on Terror and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, proceeded precisely according to plan, and began with the United States alienating and then intentionally antagonizing the only remaining fighting force in the world that could threaten the only remaining military superpower in the world.

The energy crisis is proceeding according to plan, which is why 60% of the world’s remaining oil supply is now surrounded by the United States military.

Possibility #1 is an inherent contradiction, because it requires politicians to be smart enough to get elected President of the United States or to get appointed to work in a president’s administration or whatever, and then requires them all to be overcome by collective stupidity simultaneously where certain things are concerned.  Possibility #2 doesn’t depend on any coincidences at all.  Scientists refer to this as the law of parsimony.  It’s also known as Occam’s razor.  Scientists and detectives have each discovered that when trying to figure out how something happened, the explanation that depends on the smallest number of coincidences is usually the right one.

The other major point that bears mentioning here is that keeping conspiracies that involve thousands of people secret is not difficult.  It depends on compartmentalization.  As Detective Ruppert demonstrates over the course of his book, complete knowledge of a plot like that could easily be limited to two dozen people, in which thousands more people each carried out individual actions, separated from each other.  That’s precisely how the Manhattan Project was kept secret.
As Detective Ruppert points out in the first chapter of his book (although in slightly different terms) between exponential growth and the Laws of Thermodynamics, humanity has backed itself into a corner where the energy that’s keeping roughly 3/4 of our species alive is being supplied from non-renewable sources, but most people in the world still don’t comprehend that.    That creates a political situation that a small number of politically savvy and politically powerful people would want to try to solve.  If they grew up in a cultural background where world domination was considered to be the solution to everything, woe upon the rest of us.

Now we have a terrorist organization on the loose that can threaten a military superpower, and someone who we assume was a terrorist used a biological weapon in connection to the attack.  If a new biological weapon was unleashed upon the world that killed 4 billion people, would that be an act of terrorism?  Or would that be the act of a few politically savvy and politically powerful people attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them?

The video of the airliner crashing into the World Trade Center doesn’t prove anything.  The public assumed it proved the United States was under attack by terrorists, but it doesn’t prove sh*t.  You know why?  Because in the video you can’t see the serial numbers that were stamped onto the engine and airframe of the plane.  All the video shows is a plane that looked like one of the airliners that had been hijacked an hour before crashing into the building.

…But there were five air force training exercises taking place over North America that morning, some of which were using remote controlled airplanes.

The technology exists to pilot a plane by remote control.  Were the airlines hijacked only once?  Or were they hijacked twice?  First by the terrorists, and then by the CIA by remote control, to make sure the terrorists hit their targets.  Or to make the planes fly somewhere else and make sure other remote control planes hit the targets.

You know how the CIA trained al Qaeda?  And you know how the CIA competed against the KGB and infiltrated the Kremlin back during the Cold War?  And you know how al Qaeda’s big headquarters were in some caves out in the mountains?  And you know how al Qaeda’s operatives were divided up into lots of splinter cells?  Why do you think it wasn’t possible for CIA agents to infiltrate the command structure of al Qaeda and start giving their own orders to some of its cells?

Next question:  How do you suppose it happened that in New York City and Washington D.C. on the morning of September 11th, disaster exercises were being conducted?  That put a whole bunch of disaster relief equipment and personnel into both of the target cities, but made the disaster relief personnel assume that anything they heard about a real-life emergency was just part of their training exercise.

Next question:  You know how the CIA’s headquarters was in World Trade Center 7?  If remote controlled planes crashed into the World Trade Center, whoever was controlling them would need remote control equipment nearby.  But no remote control equipment was ever found.  But then, World Trade Center 7 was destroyed, remember?   It collapsed mysteriously that afternoon after everyone had been evacuated, and destroyed a lot of top-secret government computers.

One last question:  You know how President Bush was visiting an elementary school on the morning of September 11th? If you’ve seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, you’ve seen President Bush looking like a moron, sitting there reading the story to the kids, being interrupted by his head of security, and refusing to interrupt the children’s story to go deal with a national emergency.  Here’s the big question Michael Moore forgot to ask:   President Bush was making a scheduled  appearance at a public  location, about 25 miles from the White House.  Now terrorists were crashing airliners into buildings and killing thousands of people.  It would’ve been really, really, really f*cking easy for someone to find out where he was going to be that morning, and it would’ve been really, really, really f*cking easy for someone to crash an airliner into the school where he was.  And still President Bush chose to stick to his publicized schedule.  Is he really that much of a f*cking moron?  Or did he know, somehow, that he wasn’t in any danger from hundred-ton airplanes full of jet fuel screeching out of the sky at 500 miles per hour?

What did you see on September 11th?

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A lot of people who read my first book couldn’t tell whose side I’m on in the feminism/ masculinism debate.  So just to re-capitulate:  Feminists are people who are trying to win the recognition women deserve as an equally important half of our species.  They’ve been making a lot of mistakes, but that’s inevitable, because they’re trying to bridge the differences between, literally, the two most different groups of people in the world—men and women.  A lot of the male/female problems have been caused by men accidentally trapping themselves in a physio-economic recession by inventing so many labor-saving machines to help them get things done that women don’t have to put up with their sh*t anymore.  A lot of men feel like life isn’t fair because women don’t depend on men to make their lives complete nearly as much as men depend on women to make their lives complete.  A lot of so-called “men” find it’s a lot easier to stand around being whiny little b*tches about women thinking they deserve equality to men, instead of going out and using their manly abilities to actually accomplish something in life.  Like any other debate I’m here to settle, it’s not so much a question of who’s right and who’s wrong, as it is a question of who’s f*cking up worse than who.  Is anybody still wondering which side that is here?

Now I’m sure we all know the stereotype of feminists as being lesbians who don’t shave their armpits and sit around complaining about how much they hate men, and who call that liberation.
There was a professor at my college who was a militant feminist, who said that once the technology exists, women should just splice their eggs together, give birth to girls, and let men die out, and do you have any idea how many problems that would solve in the world?

What a dumb cunt.  Oops, I mean, what an intelligence-challenged female reproductory organ.  Splicing eggs requires an industrialized technological level.  Living within the physical limitations of the Earth requires a lot of human muscle power that men have and women don’t.

I once came upon a website from somewhere in Australia, where someone had posted a photo of a lady tandem skydiving, topless.  That means she was skydiving with an instructor strapped with his chest pressed tight to her back.  (I’ve done this before.  It let’s you jump from about 3 times higher up and saves you about 8 hours of training time before you make the jump, because the instructor knows everything he needs to know about how to make a safe jump.  The alternative is to jump solo, and there’s a whole lot of ways an inexperienced skydiver can kill himself.  And sure enough, in the words of the instructor I jumped with, “When I link our harnesses together, you’re going to be glad I’m straight.”)

Anyway, there was this lady skydiving with her tits hanging out and this guy strapped to her back.  And somebody had attached a caption to the photo that said, “Enjoy the ride.”  Now a whole bunch of people were arguing about what the picture and caption meant.

To me it was obvious that this was a deft little stroke of double-entendre, because the caption could be attached to either person in the photo and give the words completely different meaning.  But reading through the arguments people had posted made it more amusing still, because it was pretty obvious what information and anti-information packages everyone was using.

First you had a bunch of reasonable people who had the same basic perspective I did, minus my career as a professional artist and my new career as a punk evolutionary theorist.  These people said things like, “It’s just a piece of artwork.  It only has whatever meaning you attach to it.”
That was close, but not quite true.  In the first book I told you all about the evolutionary origins of art, from picturesque landscapes to punk chicks pissing on the floors of supermarkets.  Then in the second book I showed you how art creates cultural values, with my example of Australian Muppet Anarchists in Space and Science Fiction for Republicans—also known as Farscape and Babylon 5.   So it was inevitable that the content of this piece of artwork, like all others, was going to pull some basic ideas out of everyone’s subconsciousness.  Due to people’s differences in life experiences and cultural background, people were going to attach different emotional meaning to those basic ideas, and some might even shuttle those ideas off into an anti-information package and be unaffected by them, or replace them with something else and react emotionally to that.  An artist can’t force everyone to react to his artwork the same way, but he can deduce, based on his audience’s cultural background, how the majority of them will react to certain imagery.  So artwork doesn’t simply have “whatever meaning you attach to it”, but it’s something pretty close to that.

There were some feminists in the discussion who realized this little loophole but took it way too far in the opposite direction.  They started debating about things like the expressions the people had on their faces, possible reasons the people had those expressions, their positions in the photo, whether or not the emotional states or positions of the people in the photo were relevant to the artwork itself, and I think maybe even the positioning of the words in relation to the photo.  So these feminists were basically amateurs trying to apply behavioral psychology to the artwork to determine the artist’s intention when he created the artwork, and who thought they were right, reacted emotionally to that, and expected everyone to agree with them.  So while they were correct in saying that artwork doesn’t simply have “whatever meaning you attach to it”, the alternative they came up with was way further off.

These feminists’ opinion of the artwork was that it was anti-feminist, misogynistic, and counter-revolutionary.  The fact that the man was on top of the woman implied masculine dominance.  [Except for the fact that assuming he was the instructor and she was the student, that’s how tandem skydiving works.]  They both had big grins on their faces.  For the man that was to be expected, because he was skydiving strapped to the back of a topless woman.  But the fact that the woman had such a big grin on her face didn’t prove anything, because she could be insane or drunk or something.  [That in spite of the fact that a photo of two people skydiving with big grins on their faces most readily implies that skydiving is fun.]   The fact that she was skydiving topless made her a sex object.  [Unless she was skydiving topless because she was an empowered woman who though that would be fun.]  The fact that someone had taken a photo of the topless woman skydiving proved  that she was being turned into a sex object.  [Unless this photo was taken as a means of communicating to other women that it was possible for women to be so empowered that they go skydiving topless just because it’s fun.]  And then I think the argument came around to the fact that the caption was attached to the top of the photo, which put it closer to the man, which implied that it was supposed to refer to him.  [Except that the artist was faced with the choice between attaching the caption to the top of the photo or the bottom, which would’ve put it closer to one or the other of the people in the photo, and the brightest and most noticeable spot in the photo was the topless White woman somewhere close to the center of the photo, which meant that was the part of the photo that the audience’s eyes would be drawn to first, followed by the words sometime afterwards, so that when they put the pieces together chronologically it made the words seem to refer to the woman first and the man second, regardless of their relationship to the photo.]  And the fact that the man was in the background and that the words could be applied to him to give them a completely different meaning proved this was a subtle masculinist tactic to secretly undermine the feminist empowerment message of the artwork.

The actual debate would probably fill up about 10 pages of this book, but I think that pretty well covers all the main points that were made.

Basically, these feminists were trying to be the Gestapo of artwork, who were trying to control what people were going to think and the cultural values they were going to develop as a result of looking at the artwork.  They weren’t trying to pass laws, but they were trying (in vain) to use feminist morality developed from a strictly female perspective to convince men and women alike that they were right and that everyone who disagreed with them was wrong.  They were attempting to use logic and reason to alter everyone’s perception of the situation in order to alter everyone’s behavior, but they didn’t realize that their version of logic and reason was not universally inclusive.  They didn’t realize how much their perception of the situation was affected by their own life experience and cultural background, and they had no idea of the effects that gender has on shaping people’s brains and consequently their perceptions of the world.  So they were falling into the usual trap feminists fall into, putting forth arguments that make perfect sense to them but to everyone else make them look like a bunch of whiny bitches—and accusing everyone who accused them of being whiny bitches of having been brainwashed by the misogynistic masculinist culture, which just proved they were right in everything they said.

As I’ll show you throughout this book, if the success of your political ideology depends on preventing or discouraging people from thinking about certain things, then your political ideology obviously doesn’t work, because it doesn’t encompass the entire realm of human behavior.  What you have is a political ideology that works well under certain conditions.  If your conditions then stray from the ideal conditions for your ideology, the most effective way for you to make your ideology continue to function under the new conditions is to try to force everyone to continue cooperating with your ideology.  And that’s been the bane of monarchy, theocracy, Communism, Capitalism, and every other political ideology we’ve tried and eventually abandoned over the course of history.

Anyway, my point is, in the pursuit of personal empowerment, developing a perception of the situation that’s the complete opposite from the way your oppressors want you to perceive the situation is not the end of the road.  It’s only a beginning.  And not even the only possible beginning.

In the quest for personal empowerment, you are not truly empowered until you have made your enemy irrelevant to your situation.  As long as you are doing the opposite of what your enemy wants you to do, you’re still reacting to the enemy.  That means the enemy is continuing to define your perception of the situation and therefore is controlling your actions.

If you consider yourself an empowered feminist, you are not truly empowered until you are willing to protest against masculine dominance by dancing naked in the streets.  Not that I’m suggesting you should do this, my point is, if you rejected that idea outright, unconditionally, simply because its seems at first glance like something your enemies would enjoy you doing, then the information and anti-information packages you’re using to interpret the world are still the ones that were created by your enemies.  Your mind is not yet your own.

And I’m just using feminism here as an example.  The same thing applies to anyone who’s trying to liberate themselves from anyone else.

I’ve heard of a lot of people in the Globalization 4.0 movement who have found different ways to use public nudity as a means of protest.  For one example, 2,000 naked people marching down the street in protest of uptight Christians trying to enforce their morality on everyone else don’t get arrested.  They get ignored—that is, to the extent that it’s possible for people to ignore 2,000 naked people marching down the street.  You know why?  Because who the hell would dare to try to arrest 2,000 naked people and take them all to jail?  They’re all  breaking the law, but the local jail won’t hold 2,000 people, and even if it would, transporting them there would tie up 1,000 police cars—or maybe 200 paddy wagons, which the police probably don’t have.  Not to mention, all it would take would be for one of those 2,000 people to accuse a police officer of molesting them—or maybe all of those 2,000 people to accuse police officers of molesting them—and the local court system would be backed up for months.

And that would still be a victory for the protestors, because preventing the court from upholding laws was the whole point of the march.  Flooding the court with public nudity cases would force the judge to choose between which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce—the laws that actually protect the public, or the useless laws that uphold Christian morality.  The police not daring to arrest 2,000 people for public nudity would just be a different version of useless laws not being enforced—not to mention, a more public display of those laws not being enforced.

Oh, and by the way, while all you empowered feminists are out there dancing naked in the streets, would one of you mind giving President Bush a blowjob while you’re at it?  I mean, President Clinton got impeached for lying about getting a blowjob, and we’ve gotta get President Bush out of there somehow.  He lied to get us into a war, and now about a million people are dead, but now that we have a Democrat majority in Congress, they’re too chickensh*t to do anything about it.  So it’s time for Plan B.  I know that just about every self-respecting empowered feminist in America would probably rather protest the war by dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire on the front lawn of the White House than to give President Bush a blowjob, but hey, this is war, and sacrifices have to be made.  Just think of it this way:  We’ve got 4,000 Americans dead so far and about 30,000 wounded.  I’m sure you won’t be the first American to get shot in the mouth by the enemy.  But remember, it is critical that we get President Bush to lie and say that he didn’t get a blowjob from you.  So if you’re a hot college intern, I’m sorry, but this is just not a job for you.  If you’re an overweight naked feminist in your late 70s with no teeth, that would be ideal.

Anyway, I’ve met plenty of women who can be considered truly empowered because they don’t simply not do what men want them to do, they have rendered men completely irrelevant to their lives and now do whatever they feel like, regardless of what affect it does or doesn’t have on men.

I have three friends, who I’ll call the Virgin, the Medieval Stripper, and the Bar Fight Queen.  They’re all tall, slender women in their 20s and early 30s, and I’ve seen all of them naked, because that’s just the kind of people we are.  But I never considered sleeping with any of them, because that’s just the kind of people we are.  They were just doing their thing, changing clothes or whatever, and they didn’t care that I was in the room.  Like I said, they’ve all rendered men completely irrelevant to their lives.  They all have boyfriends too—or maybe several—and they’ve left many more in their wakes, who all thought they were hot at first but ended up feeling like they’ve been run over by a bulldozer.  Because these women know what they want, and they let nothing stand in their way.

The Virgin is pure evil.  I know this because we were housemates for a couple of months.

Her parents must’ve swingers who met at the disco or something.  She was born in the early 80s, so it must’ve been the final days of disco.  Anyway, when she was a teenager they kept pressuring her to go out and meet some boy and get laid.  So she did what every teenager does, and… no, you pervert, she rebelled against her parents.  Why the hell do you think I call her the Virgin?

The Virgin loves to break boys’ hearts.  Many have tried to get in her pants, and all have failed.

The Virgin’s goal in life isn’t to stay a virgin forever.  Her goal is to meet up with a nice guy she wants to marry.  Or at least, live with more or less forever.  You know, like chicks did back before the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ rolls revolution.

So the Virgin meets up with guys all the time, and they’re interested in her, so they start talking to her.  And then somewhere along the way, fairly soon, she tells them that she’s a virgin and she intends to stay that way until she meets a nice guy she wants to settle down with and they spend a couple of years together to make sure they’re right for each other.  Or something like that.

And you know what the guys always do?  They stop talking to her.

Now, apply a little behavioral psychology to the situation here (which the Virgin is exceptionally good at, not that you need to be in this case) and it’s pretty obvious that guys who quit talking to chicks the instant they hear they’re virgins and intend to stay that way for the foreseeable future, have certain things in mind that are a lot higher on their list of priorities than finding true love.

And I suppose I should point out that the Virgin doesn’t go to singles’ group meetings at our local church to meet guys, she’s been a landmark in the local Rocky Horror Picture Show scene for 6 or 7 years.  Now she’s head of the lighting department.  So we are talking about the embodiment of the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll revolution here, and we are talking about punks, goths, and ravers… and especially goths… in their late teens or early 20s.  So considering the priorities of people from this particular cultural background, it isn’t surprising that “getting hot chicks in bed” is a lot higher on their list of priorities than “finding true love”.

In the Relationships chapter I talked about hot women being the pinnacle of the relationship pyramid—after gay men, that is—because they’re the ones that all the guys want.  So this is one solution a hot woman has found to that.  She can’t leave the house without guys trying to get in her pants, but their reasons for wanting to get in her pants aren’t all that beneficial for her.  So instead of having to go through endless social rituals with every guy she meets, hoping she can find a good one and guessing wrong most of the time, she decided what her goals in life were and she lays the cards on the table right up front:

“What are your goals in this situation?  That’s what I thought.  See ya, sucker.”

She processes guys’ relationship applications with mechanical efficiency, and never compromises on her position.  Like me, she spends an awful lot of her life with nothing but her high standards to keep her company, but the alternative is to devote an awful lot of her life to useless dead-end relationships just so she can feel like she has someone to keep her company.

The Virgin is a master—or maybe, mistress—at emotional aikido, which is why I say she’s pure evil.  Because she always uses her abilities to make situations turn out in her favor, which isn’t always very favorable for the other person.

She has one technique I could best describe as weaponized  cuteness.  She uses all the emotional communication signals of a five or six-year-old.  Then she acts really immature—meaning self-obsessed—like a five or six-year old.  So she outmaneuvers your psychological reaction to her because from the emotional communication cues she’s giving you, she makes you feel like you are talking to a five or six-year-old, so you’re really patient with her and you give her what she wants because she gets you to feel like she’s trying to be good but just doesn’t know any better.  If she pulls off the sensory illusion all the way, she can get you to feel so much like you’re talking to a five or six-year-old that you don’t notice that she’s actually 23 and stands 5’11”.

Even if she doesn’t pull her sensory illusion off completely, she still creates a path of least resistance for you that leads you right where she wants it to lead you.  Since she’s 23 but acts like she’s 5 or 6, it’s impossible to tell how she really perceives the situation.  Does she have an adult perception of the situation, or doesn’t she?  If you treat her like she does have an adult perception of the situation and she doesn’t, what’s she going to do?  Throw a temper tantrum?  If you do that and she does throw a temper tantrum, is everyone around you going to think you’re an a**hole for not being patient with her and not being more considerate?  Or does she understand most of the situation, but not quite all of it, and she would understand it if she had a few more pieces of information to work with?  But what are those pieces of information?  Since she isn’t trying to use any information and instead is running away from the whole situation emotionally, she isn’t giving you any clues to which pieces of information she has and which she doesn’t have, so you have no idea which direction to go from there.  So the easiest way to deal with her is to treat her like she really is a five or six-year-old, because you can’t figure out any other way to try to get the situation to turn out favorably for yourself.  But if you try to make the situation turn out as favorably as you can for yourself that way, you make it turn out even more favorably for her, because you play right into her hands.

The Virgin is so good at weaponized cuteness and uses it so much of the time that I’d known her for about 3 or 4 years before we ended up living in the same house, and it was only then that I discovered she wasn’t really that immature.  Prior to that, I figured that her immaturity was just another way she was rebelling—still—against her parents trying to get her to grow up faster.  I figured she’d grown up with a feeling of not being allowed to be a kid, so her brain had developed with the feeling of needing to try extra-hard to be a kid.  Based on what I knew of her at the time, all the pieces of the puzzle were perfectly consistent.

Having lived with her for two months, I can say that if anything, all the pieces of the puzzle are even more consistent that I realized.  As it turns out, much of her immaturity is an act that she uses when other people are around.  That’s not to say that she always uses it consciously, but that is to say that she learned how to do it by rebelling against her parents, and now when she acts in whatever way feels most appropriate to her to try to make situations turn out favorably for her, she does what she’s good at.  Her weaponized cuteness works so well that she can afford to be so self-obsessed when other people are around, and she can still afford to be that self-obsessed when she’s all by herself and acting like an adult.  (Or as the case may be, isn’t literally all by herself, but comes home and takes her emotional disguise off, anyway.)  She has learned to act like an adult when it suits her, but being so self-obsessed has always worked so well for her that she’s never needed to learn anything else.

When she moved into the house we shared, she was looking for a job.  She was having a lot of trouble finding one though.  Finding a really sh*tty job is easy—it’s always easy.  But then you get trapped in a situation where you have to spend all your time working at your sh*tty job to try to make ends meet, and you don’t have any time to go look for another job, because the only time another business where you could work in the same occupation is open so you could bring them your resume and then come back another day for an interview, is during your work-day at your sh*tty job.

The Virgin finally found a job, but it was about a week or two before her mother got her two weeks of vacation time.  She’d been planning on coming to visit for months.  And on top of that, she’s working in Iraq.  She works for KBR, which is a subsidiary of Halliburton (I guess evil runs in their family!), and they pay her 70 grand a year to be a receptionist at a hotel in Baghdad.

So the Virgin told her new employers that her mother was working in Iraq and she was coming home for a vacation for a couple of weeks, so she’d need two weeks off.  They told her too bad. So the Virgin worked there for a week or two and then quit.

She thought she had another job lined up that she’d be able to go to after her mother went back to Iraq, but then that fell through.  And then she kept having a lot of trouble finding a job.  And for the rest of the time she lived there, she never found one.

So here’s what all that has to do with her weaponized cuteness and her immature self-obsession.  She lived there four months and only paid half a month’s rent.  Our other housemate, the Former Meth Addict Stripper (you think I’m making these people up, don’t you?) who was the one with the lease on the house, finally threw here out.  The two of them used to be friends, and now they’re not anymore.  I don’t know what went on between the two of them exactly, but obviously the Former Meth Addict Stripper (I’ve seen her naked too, frequently—no, not professionally, you pervert) never figured out how to convince the Virgin that she really did need to pay her rent.  Every time she tried, the path of least resistance always led to her letting the Virgin keep staying there without paying her rent.  Finally, the only other way she could find to even try to make the situation turn out in her favor was to throw the Virgin out.  But even that didn’t turn out to be very favorable, because for four months afterward she had an empty room that nobody paid rent on.  So all that is consistent with the Virgin getting people to have a lot of patience with her because they feel like she’s doing the best she can.

Now the Former Meth Addict Stripper hates the Virgin’s guts because the Virgin still owes her three and a half months’ rent and she can’t figure out how to get her to pay—or even to feel like she needs to pay.  The Virgin still doesn’t have a job, last I knew, so she still can’t pay even if she wanted to.

On the Virgin’s side, she can’t figure out why the Former Meth Addict Stripper is being such a b*tch to her now.  So that’s still consistent with the Virgin getting away with being so self-obsessed when other people are around and not realizing how self-obsessed she still is when other people aren’t around.

Ironically, the Virgin has another tactic she uses sometimes that you could call weaponized maturity.  Basically, no matter how much of an adult you’re being, she’s being more of an adult.  Or if you seem to be acting immaturely, she starts acting like an adult.  So she lures you into a contest of who can be more of an adult than who, and she makes you realize you should already have been in the contest because after all, you are an adult.

I saw her do this one night when she and I and the Rocky producer were driving back from visiting the Bar Fight Queen.  She was hungry so we stopped into a Sonic Burger or something like that.

At the Sonic (or whatever this place was) they used a retro ‘50s arrangement, where you pull up to a parking space under an awning and order from what’s for all intents and purposes a drive-through menu.  When you tell them what you want, they bring it out to your car.  That way you can use it as a drive through that works pretty well, or you can stay and eat in your car and listen to your own music and whatever else, which you can’t do at a regular fast food restaurant.  And maybe they have tables inside too, I don’t remember.

So the Virgin made her order and a chick brought it out to her.  And the order was wrong.  The Virgin ordered a medium drink, and they brought her a small, but they still charged her for a medium.  So the Virgin told the chick it was wrong.  The chick said she’d go exchange it.  But I was tired and wanted to go home.  So the Virgin said no, she didn’t have time.  We’d already had to wait quite a while for them to bring us what they had.  So the chick offered to go get her another drink for free, and she’d be right back.  But again the Virgin told her no, because I was tired and needed to go home—even though I didn’t really want to go home that badly.

The Virgin wasn’t doing this for the sake of getting the right order.  The chick had offered to fix it.   It was pretty obvious by the end that sticking an emotional barb in the chick’s hide and making her regret  bringing us the wrong order was worth more to the Virgin than a free soda.  I doubt it was worth anything to the Virgin in practical terms, because she didn’t go to that Sonic (or whatever it was) regularly.  What she got out of the deal was the satisfaction of teaching the chick a lesson.

So what do you suppose happened when the Virgin got into an emotional aikido duel against me?

One night at the Rocky Horror Picture Show I needed to get some photos taken for my website.  I needed lights and a stage (or at least, something as close to a stage as I could get.)  Between the time the Virgin finished setting up her lights and the house opened to let the audience in, I had a window of opportunity of about five minutes.  So I started refocusing her lights.  I’ve worked in theatre most of my adult life.  I work with stage equipment for a living.  And just about ever light I’ve ever touched in my entire career cost more than hers.

But when she saw me handling her lights, she told me that they were her lights, nobody touches her lights, and if I want them moved I need to tell her where I want them and she’ll move them.

Four minutes to doors open.  My life’s work depends on this photo shoot.  I needed photos for my website, so I could get people to buy enough copies of Volume I that I could quit my job and free up another 40 hours per week to spend writing more books. And this was the only place I could go to get on a stage in front of lights.  So suffice it to say I had way the f*ck more important priorities than she did.

But I also knew how f*cking immature she was.  Even if I did have time to explain all of that to her, it wouldn’t make the slightest impression on her.

So I reverted my aviation speaking habits and started being very direct.  Of course she misinterpreted it, but anything else I could’ve done she would’ve misinterpreted even worse.
She did what I told her, but then she said, “…And by the way, thanks for being so nice to us while we’re doing all of this for you.”

A very deft emotional aikido move, even if completely misplaced.  She was playing her weaponized maturity technique, and was reinforcing it with her weaponized cuteness.  She communicated to me her perception of how I was talking to her, and she communicated to everyone else in the room that she was being more mature than I was and more innocent that I was, all at the same time!  If she’d come anywhere close to correctly identifying my reasons for talking to her the way I was talking, it would’ve been an unconditional victory for her.  But she didn’t, so all it ended up being was unconditional bitchiness.

What she wanted from me was superficial bullsh*t general politeness.  She wanted emotional communication.  But emotional communication requires time and energy.  I didn’t have any time, so I was focusing all my energy on completing the mission I’d come here for.

Three minutes.

The way she was acting, if I’d tried telling her anything she didn’t want to hear, or told her that her perception of the situation was wrong, or tried to disagree with anything she had already decided was right, she could’ve thrown some temper tantrum and turned off all her lights.  Or maybe she wouldn’t’ve done that, and she was just acting  like she would but it was all a bluff.  Either way, she was f*cking up my life for her own amusement.

Two minutes.

But the photographer got a bunch of photos and everything turned out all right.

The story of what happened when she got into an emotional aikido duel with me was that we got into a conflict with each other that we had no way of working out at the time, so we ended up sparring back and forth a little, pitting emotional aikido against emotional self-defense, carried out the mission, and both walked away unscathed.  The conflict between us could’ve spiraled out of control in any number of ways that could’ve had disastrous results for either or both of us (probably me), but we contained it to the situation itself and didn’t let it get in the way of our doing what we needed to do.

When our time was up, she told me our time was up, politely, without playing any double beat or any emotional aikido technique, for maybe the first time ever in her life that she was out in public.  So I thanked her for her help and got out of her way while she refocused her lights.
I’ve told you all this about her for a reason.  As it turns out, she’s a lot like me in a lot of ways.

She’s way the hell smarter than most people she meets, and for the life of her she just can’t find an education or an occupation that lets her put all her abilities to use.  Hence her reason for having so much trouble finding a job—because she’s sick of getting stuck with sh*tty jobs.

And hence her having gotten so good at manipulating people.  Just like everyone else, she’s using her abilities to try to make a life for herself.  She lives in an environment full of people, so getting people to do what she wants them to do is a very big way to make a life for herself.  And she has nothing else to do with her abilities, so that’s what she devotes them all to.

The critical difference between her and me is that she was born in the f*cking eighties!  She’s younger  than MTV!  So she has negligible attention span, a middle class American grasp of how the world works, and virtually no point of reference from which to distinguish between superficial bullsh*t and things that have profound importance attached to them.  Instead, she measures the importance of anything solely on its superficial value.  She’s smart enough to know there’s more to the world than that, but she knows very few other people who are that smart, so she has basically no way of learning any more about the world than what she can see and what most people tell her it means.

I meet a lot of kids like that.

Now what all this has to do with feminine empowerment is that she knows what she wants, she knows what her abilities are, she figures out how to use her abilities to get what she wants, and she doesn’t f*cking care how anybody else feels about that.  She doesn’t understand the world nearly as well as she thinks she does, but to the extent that she does understand it, she has figured out how to make full use of everything in her environment to make a life for herself.

Now here’s the tragic ending to her story.  Between being so intelligent and being so good at emotional aikido, she’s really good at working at call centers answering telephones.  Yes!  She’s one of those people!  I practically shoved a fistful of garlic in her face and drove a stake through her heart when I found that out!  And I was already living with her then!

But you remember what I said about her not being able to find a job that puts her abilities to good use?  She’s really good at answering phones but she f*cking hates it.  But it’s the job she’s found that puts her abilities to the best use.  Hence the reason she so dreads getting stuck in yet another sh*tty job.

The Medieval Stripper is a sex worker.  By that I mean she gives men hard-ons on a professional basis.

The Medieval Stripper likes being naked, she likes dancing, and she likes making lots of money.  So she combined her interests and got a job.

In the Medieval Stripper’s words, “The dumbest form of life is a man with a hard-on.”  If you can give a man a hard-on you can convince him of anything.

A lot of people assume that all sex workers are the victims of predatory men.  For a lot of sex workers I’m sure that’s true.

BUT.

For empowered women who have rendered men irrelevant to their lives and now play their own game by their own rules, I can assure you, the hunters have become the hunted.  And if the former hunters don’t believe that, that just proves how good these feminist hunters are.

I’m sure that for a lot of hunter guys, a woman who acts like a hunter is a real turn-on because it makes her seem like that much more of a challenge.  And that is true.  But if you honestly believe you can ever win against a feminist hunter and claim the prize you want so badly, all that proves is that she’s lured you into your own trap.  You do not yet fathom what hunting means. Check yourself, buddy.  She gave you a hard-on, didn’t she?  That means you perceived basically nothing about the situation.

Now, women have been using sex to get what they want from men for, what, about 7,000,000 years?  At least?  So like any other industry that has been around for 7,000,000 years, people who work in that industry have developed a whole lot of specialized skills for doing their job.  I don’t want to go giving away anyone’s trade secrets here, but here’s one example:

If you get too close to a stripper, like, you try to grab her ass or something, and she can get away from you neatly, you’re f*cked.   She’s going to smile real big while she backs away from you and shakes her finger at you as though to say, “Oh no, no, no you naughty little boy.”  This is a literal emotional aikido move, and she just fed you some floor tiles.

First of all, you didn’t throw her off her groove, so you didn’t disrupt her performance.

Second, she let you know that you crossed the line—or more likely, that you were getting too close to the line.

Third, she just let everyone else in the room know that you crossed the line, or were getting too close to it.  People like, all your friends who came with you, and everyone else in the audience, and all the bouncers in the room.

Finally, she shows everyone that you dared to challenge her and she won.  That only adds to her performance and makes her even more desirable, because you thought you were the hunter and you became the hunted.  And she made kicking your ass look like it was all part of her show.
What was it you were trying to get out of the deal again?

The Bar Fight Queen has two kids and she’s financially independent, so she has no further use for men in the traditional sense.

Now the Bar Fight Queen is an ethical slut.  Hence her title.  Which she came up with herself—but it’s kind of a joke.  She likes having sex, she likes not being tied down to one man, and like hot women everywhere, she can’t leave the house without lots of guys trying to get in her pants.  So she found her own way to combine her interests and opportunities and found the arrangement that suited her best.

The Bar Fight Queen is very careful in her selections.  She picks her men from different backgrounds so they can’t possibly know each other or meet each other by accident.  She isn’t deceitful about it; they all know about each other.

She’s also very crafty about it.  However she got to be this way, she’s really good at male psychology.  If you’re attracted to her, she knows more about why you’re attracted to her than you do.  Then she uses it to her advantage.  By knowing what you want out of the situation, she’s able to work with that to make sure she gets what she wants out of the situation.  But she’s also cooperative about it.  By knowing what you want out of the situation, she can make sure you get what you want too.

She’s also very nice about it.  Sometimes even too nice.  She mainly picks guys who haven’t been very successful with women.  Then she tells them she doesn’t care if they run around with other women.  For most guys that would be a dream come true.

Unfortunately, her benevolence gets the best of her male psychology here.  Since these are guys who haven’t been very successful with women before, instead of being glad that she doesn’t care if they run around with other women, a lot of them fall in love with her.  Then she has to put a stop to that.  But she’s always as nice as she can be about it.  First she tries to get them to understand her side of the story.  But sometimes she has to break up with them.

Another place you wouldn’t expect to look for feminism is in the porno industry.  Which is why a group of people set out to change that.

Suicide Girls is the biggest punk site on the internet.  And how do you get to be the biggest punk site on the internet?  By working in the biggest industry on the internet:  Sex.

Suicide Girls is basically MySpace for punks, minus all the advertizements.  You pay $4 a month or something for your membership, so they don’t have to sell advertizement space.

The founders of Suicide Girls decided that instead of trying to fight for feminism by fighting against the porno industry, they would fight for feminism by invading the porno industry.  They didn’t have a problem with the porno industry itself; some women like getting photographed nude, and if you try to protect people’s rights by preventing them from doing what they like, you aren’t protecting their rights, you’re protecting your values.

What the Suicide Girls produce is not pornography in the sense that you’d probably think of it if I said that’s what it was.  It’s nude art.  Whatever else it is or isn’t is up to the models.  They use free-range models, so each model works on her own terms, submits her own work, and then the owners of the site decide whether they want to buy it or not.  They have certain standards, because they have a general business sense of what will or won’t go over well, but mainly what they’re interested in is creativity—you know, art.

So they get all kinds of weird stuff.  Naked chicks jumping through in snow drifts, naked chicks lifting weights—like, 300 pounds at a time, naked chicks cleaning shotguns, naked chicks rebuilding their motorcycles, whatever.   In other words, women who like being naked and like being photographed, doing what they like.

There was even one model who posed nude outside the research station where she works.  In Antarctica.   Where do Playboy models pose nude?  In bedrooms and showers and swimming pools and on beaches and a bunch of unimaginative crap like that?   So as you can see, the Suicide Girls are putting the word art back into the term nude art.

Also, they don’t restrict their models to looking like Barbie dolls.  They come in all colors, sizes, and shapes—well, shapes to a point, anyway.  Not to be sexist, they set up another site called Suicide Boys.  And not to be shape-ist they set up a site called Curvy Girls, for overweight models… or whatever the politically correct term is.

Just to give you an idea how non-Barbie-doll of models they accept, they have one model who got in an accident and had to get one of her legs amputated at the knee.  So when she got her prosthetic leg, you know what she did?  She got tattoos painted on it!

When I found out they were the biggest punk site on the net, I joined up.  Then I made the mistake of talking about my work there. Just like the evolutionary scientists, the Suicide Girls were under siege by the Bush administration.  I figured, what better place to talk about the most controversial project in the history of humankind but on the biggest punk site in the world, right?

Big f*cking mistake.  Cuz I met up with a whole bunch of pseudo-intellectuals and fake intellectuals and fashionably dumb people and mental communists and fashionably helpless people and fashionably oppressed people and people who played stupid and all kinds of crap.

Finally I pissed too many people off and got kicked off the site.  They are Capitalists, after all, which is how you get to be the biggest punk site on the net—or biggest of any kind of site on the net.  So they’re not in the business of selling reality, they’re in the business of selling whatever version of reality the most people are willing to pay for.  But at least now I can say that my project is so controversial I got kicked off the biggest punk site in the world for it.  Hey, I made myself the King of Kings two books ago.  Now I can say I’m also the Punk of Punks.

Speaking of Capitalists, feminine empowerment, and the sex industry, I can’t end this section without saying something else.  Basically, if you try to copy what the Suicide Girls do and make money on the trend they started by commandeering it, gutting it of its content, and then selling a hollow plastic replica of it, you’d better plan on failing.  As I’ve said before, in other terms, despite what a lot of Capitalists wish, other people’s ability to adapt to their situation is not a resource for you to make money on.

When I lived in Portland, at one point I lived out on the edge of the city near a snooty sophisto suburb.  Every week I’d get some free lifestyle newspaper in the mail.  It was full of a bunch of crap that my sophisto neighbors thought was important.  Sometimes when I was bored I’d glance through it just to chuckle at how superficial their lives were.

There was one lady who wrote a regular editorial column.  One week she wrote about the emotional hardship of sending her two children away to Europe for semesters abroad.  The following week she wrote an article complaining about the new law that had been passed, which allowed underage strippers to work in clubs that served alcohol.

Now, I’ve known an awful lot of sex workers in my time… No, not professionally,  you pervert!  Anyway, having known so many women who work in the sex industry who I met in no way related to their occupations, I got the distinct impression that I knew a side to the story that she was completely oblivious to.  As one former stripper I’d known once told me, the worst part about her job was knowing that dirty old men were going to go home at night and jerk off thinking about her.

So I wrote a letter to this columnist and said, in effect:

Look, you dumb bitch,

Instead of asking why 18-year-old strippers are being allowed to work in clubs that serve alcohol, maybe you ought to be asking why we live in a society where the best way so many 18-year-old women can find to make a living is by taking off their clothes every night in front of crowds of men they don’t even know.  Not everyone has parents who can send them away for college semesters in Europe, you know!

She didn’t write back to me.  I wasn’t expecting her to.

Hey, if you want to talk about Capitalists trying to use other people’s adaptability as capital they can use to make money for themselves, adapting to our situation is exactly what the global Green-Anarcho-Socialist revolution is doing.  Try making a profit on that!

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The Republican party isn’t a progressive activist force.  I just included it in this chapter because it’s a valuable study in how evolutionary factors came together to create the enemy’s point of view.  In order to defeat the enemy, first you must understand him.  Not to mention, in order to avoid becoming the enemy, you must understand where he went wrong.

Here in America we have the conservative party and the liberal party, the Republicans being the conservative party.  A lot of people say Republicans are just plain stupid.  But a lot of people say that about Democrats—and for that matter, about every other group of people in the world.  It can’t simply be a matter of Republicans possessing less gross intellectual capacity than Democrats (or at least, not much less) because if that was the case, the Democrats would be able to figure out how to beat the Republicans in elections consistently.  And obviously, that hasn’t happened.

If you simply categorize the enemy as “stupid”, but you aren’t smart enough to figure out how to defeat him, what you’ve done is completely counterproductive.  You have decided that you know a certain thing to be true, when the evidence clearly contradicts it.  This means that subconsciously you have created information and anti-information packages that don’t correspond with reality.  If the Republicans were simply “stupid” but they keep wining elections anyway, obviously they do know something important about how to get what they want.  If they keep winning elections against your party, obviously they know something that you don’t.

You could keep trying to win elections by winning a 51% majority and keep pitting your political ideology against 49% of the population.  But if 49% of people keep fighting against what the other 51% are trying to do, then all your so-called political victory has accomplished is building a political system that’s basically 2% efficient.

At this point you basically have an arms race going on in your own country.  That’s what we have in America right now.  You could call it a Cold Civil War.  The Cold War was an economic war of attrition between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Neither side dared to fire the first shot because nobody actually wanted to fight the war.  So both sides kept preparing for a war until one side went bankrupt.  Here in America now, the Democrats and Republicans have completely incompatible political ideologies but neither can side can figure out a way to prove decisively that theirs is better.  So every election year the two sides wage a huge war of attrition for the sake of winning a few percentage points of the vote.  And all we end up with is a political system that can do basically nothing.  Nothing productive, anyway…

My point is, unless you can outsmart the enemy, you can’t possibly expect to win.  The Democrats and Republicans can’t even outsmart each other, and in spite of how big and well established of political forces they are, might-makes-right isn’t even working for either of them.

The alternative is to wait for something else to happen in the world that makes the other side’s political ideology stop working.  But if that’s your strategy, you don’t have a political ideology that can compete against the enemy, all you have is a political ideology that works better than his in a certain situation, and your strategy is to wait for that situation to come along.  In that case, you aren’t winning; you’re just waiting around for the enemy to lose.  And if that’s the best strategy you can come up with, you’re not a progressive activist, because a progressive activist, by definition, is someone who makes new things happen.  But waiting around for new things to happen would make you a progressive passive-ist.

Calling the enemy stupid is useless unless you can define why he’s so stupid.  Or more precisely, why he seems so stupid to you.

So start at the beginning.  He is the enemy because his ideology is mutually incompatible with yours.  His success at his goals and your success at your goals are mutually exclusive.  So what are each of your goals, and why do you each think your own goals are better than the other’s?

This is a lot harder than it seems to a lot of people, because outsmarting the enemy depends on your putting yourself in his shoes.  That is, it depends on you recognizing your ideological enemy as your equal.   And if you can recognize your ideological enemy as your equal, that tends to break down your sense of identity and your sense of his identity as enemies.  But that doesn’t change the fact that your goals are mutually exclusive, and therefore the two of you are in conflict by definition.  In this case, your goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive, and the enemy’s goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive.  The enemy’s goal is to kill you, as efficiently as possible.  You might not be his first victim, but you can plan on being his victim sooner or later, because out of the limited number of people he intends to keep alive you can be sure that he puts himself higher on the list of priorities than he puts you.  So his goal is to kill you as efficiently as possible, but in order to defeat him, you must recognize him as your equal.

Not so easy, is it?

Now you see why I’ve been throwing the word ‘enemy’ around so much in this chapter.  You’d better get used to it.  Because a lot of people who call themselves progressive activists keep trying to take an easier way out, but those ways lead them into traps.

On the one hand you have the progressively minded activists who recoil from the word “enemy”.  Not defining their opponents as the “enemy” makes it a lot easier to think of them as people and otherwise keep a positive outlook on their situation.  But by believing the situation can turn out positively, and trying to make it turn out positively by thinking positively of their opponents, what do they end up doing?  They compromise.  But that’s no solution.  Your goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive, and your enemy’s goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive.  That’s a yes or no question.  The only way you can compromise with your opponent, for the sake of feeling equal to him and not considering him your enemy, is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive.  If you want to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep 100% of people alive, and he wants to make it work in a way that can only keep 80% of people alive, how do you compromise on that?  By making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep 90% of people alive?  If you dare to call that progressive activism, then I’m asking you point blank:  Which 10% of the people do you intend to kill for the sake of saving yourself the emotional discomfort of considering your opponent the enemy?

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again:  If that’s your idea of progressive activism, don’t accuse me of trying to be the next Chairman Mao!

The other big trap progressively-minded activists are falling into is that of considering their opponents the enemy and immediately dehumanizing the enemy to make him easier to hate.  But if you dehumanize him, you underestimate him by definition.  By dehumanizing him you subconsciously save yourself the need  to outsmart him.  After that, whatever amount of brainpower you devote to trying to outsmart the enemy is going to be less that what you need to actually outsmart him.  Then when he comes at you with something you didn’t expect, you’re going to have to start looking for a reason he beat you, when the real reason he beat you is because you underestimated him.  That’s such a common emotional defense mechanism that it has a name—it’s called rationalization.

I meet a lot of progressively-minded activists who dehumanize the enemy without going so far as to call him the enemy, but who assume that he’s just too stupid to know any better.  These people have a whole lot of ideas about how the world ought to work, but they just can’t figure out an effective way to defeat their opponents.  So they try some little might-makes-right tactics and say the reason they didn’t win is because they’re so badly outnumbered, and then go back to their coffee houses to sit around drinking over-priced coffee at their problems.  But as I’ve said before, if you can’t score any meaningful victories, why should anyone see any point in joining your revolution?  A lot of these would-be revolutionaries I meet say the reason they’re so badly outnumbered is because so many people have been indoctrinated to believe what their enemies want them to believe, but then they skip from that to saying that the people who oppose them just aren’t smart enough to know any better.

According to that line of reasoning, the people who oppose them are people just like them, but in the process of being indoctrinated, some of their mental capacity was removed from their brains.  If that was the case, it shouldn’t be hard for the would-be revolutionaries to outsmart those people.  But obviously, that’s not happening.

The only way all the pieces of the puzzle fit together is that by indoctrinating the people who oppose the would-be revolutionaries, the enemy has convinced them to use their intellectual capacity against the would-be revolutionaries.  This makes them seem stupid to the would-be revolutionaries, but it leaves them intellectually equally matched.  Then the would-be revolutionaries jump to the conclusion that the fact that they’re revolutionaries and the other people have been brainwashed proves that they’re smarter than the other people, so they underestimate the other people.  The other people outsmart them, and the would-be revolutionaries can’t figure out how they did it.  That makes the would-be revolutionaries look like they don’t know what they’re doing, so nobody bothers to join them.  Then when they try to use might-makes-right tactics as a show of force, everyone ignores them, or worse, thinks that really proves the would-be revolutionaries don’t know what they’re doing.  And in a way, those people are right.

So:  The enemy is equal to you, but he has mutually exclusive goals, which is what makes him the enemy.  He’s using his equitable abilities—his George Washington power, as I called it in the last book—against you.  Now the question becomes:  Why is he using his equal abilities against you?

The obvious answer is:  Because he feels he should use his equal abilities against you.

So the next question is:  Why does he feel he should use his equal abilities against you?

The obvious answer to that is:  Because he perceives the world differently than you do.

So now we have two questions to answer:  Why does he perceive the world differently?  And:

What is the source of his perception?

Now we’re getting somewhere…

In the great state of Maine, back when I was growing up anyway, we didn’t really have a Republican and a Democrat party.  We had a Keep Things the Way They Are party and a Try Something New party.  To be fair, if what you’re doing seems to be working pretty well, why not keep doing things that way?   So for conservatives, keeping things the way they are is the most effective means they can perceive of preserving the survival of their DNA.

But here’s where things get tricky…

I think it’s safe to say there are three main things conservatives are trying to conserve:  Their traditional cultural values, their economic system, and their individual perceptions of the world.
Traditional cultural values are the most obvious.  People want a political system that will uphold what they perceive to be true about the world.  They perceive any other type of political system as a threat.   So here in America we get laws against gay marriage and laws against buying alcohol before 10 a.m. on Sundays, and laws against abortion, and laws against certain types of sexual acts, and all kinds of weird laws, just because a majority of Americans believe in a completely fictional story about the beginning of the world.  To that belief in the fictitious origin of the world, they make strong emotional attachments to the ideas that certain things are bad, so they feel that their legal system should uphold their beliefs.

Economic conservatives want to conserve their economic system.  People who have been on a 10,000-year winning streak especially  want to keep their economic system the way it is.  And the way our economic system has worked for the past 10,000 years, we’ve always had more material wealth than anyone else, and we’ve always gotten more.

Now here’s where the real problems start.  Our economic system is now stretched to the physical limitations of the Earth.  The conservatives want to keep our economic system, because they perceive that to offer them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  Unfortunately for them it isn’t physically  possible to keep our economic system the way it is.  So there you have one major difference between the conservatives and the Globalization 4.0 revolution:  We (or at least, some of us) perceive the physical limitations of the Earth, and they don’t.

Now the conservatives attach their 10,000 year winning streak to their beliefs in the fictional origins of the world.  For 10,000 years they didn’t have any other way of explaining their unbroken winning streak than by saying it was the will of the same fictional entity that created the world.  So conservatives made a lot of strong emotional attachments to the idea all that was true.
Now that conservatives have defined their fictitious origins of the world and the fictitious reasons for their 10,000-year winning streak as true, within their own minds, it automatically renders any conflicting ideas false.  If you hear someone talking about an idea that you have already defined as false for the simple reason that it conflicts with what you have already defined as true, there’s no real reason to pay attention to what that person is saying.  So when people start talking about the Big Bang, evolution, and physical limitations of the Earth, conservatives automatically dump that information into anti-information packages.  Technically they can hear the words, but those words don’t pull additional information out of their subconsciousness, so they can’t see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together to create a functional explanation for how the world works.  On the other hand, when they hear people talking about how their all knowing, all loving, all powerful Lord and Heavenly Father created the universe for his children, that pulls all kinds of ideas out of their subconsciousness, some of which they’ve heard from other people, and some of which they’ve thought of themselves.  If an all knowing, all loving, all powerful entity created the universe and humans are his children, why would he give them only a finite supply of material resources to work with?  That does not follow from the chain of logic these conservatives are working with.  And I have heard people tell me this in person—except their words are usually something like, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

So there you have another critical difference between conservatives and the Globalization 4.0 revolution:  Conservatives are depending on divine intervention to make the world’s economic system function, and we aren’t.  Or more to the point, conservatives perceive that divine intervention is an inherent part of their economic system, and we don’t.

Individuals’ perceptions of the world are the least tangible but most important thing conservatives are trying to conserve.  A lot of progressively minded people are making this mistake too, and can’t figure out why they’re having so much trouble making any progress.

As I’ve been saying for two books and counting, our natural perceptions of the world, including our emotional instincts, evolved to deal with life in the wild, as hunter-gatherers, during our species’ colonization phase.  Now that we’re moving into our sustainability phase, a lot of things we naturally perceive to be true about the world aren’t true anymore.  People can learn that their natural senses are being led astray, but teaching them that requires effort.  For people to use their natural perceptions of the world requires no effort at all.  On top of that, people naturally resist anyone’s attempt to teach them that what they feel to be true isn’t true.

When you add that to the cultural traditions and economic history of the conservatives, things get more complicated still.  People’s natural perceptions show them that the economic system we have produces the most favorable results, and then the conservatives reinforce that perception either with their religious values directly, or with values derived from their religion but practiced in a secular fashion.  Now, with Globalization 3.0, some of the conservatives’ level of material wealth is being spread to more people, and people naturally perceive material wealth to be good.  So now a lot of people are joining the conservatives’ economic system because it agrees most with their natural perceptions of the world, even though they don’t share the conservatives’ religious beliefs or cultural values.

So there you have another critical difference between conservatives and the Globalization 4.0 revolution:  We perceive the need to expend any amount of effort necessary to learn how the world actually works, and to teach that to others, while the conservatives, for various reasons, don’t perceive any need to go to the effort of learning a new way to interpret the world than the way they’ve been using.

The conservatives have a number of strengths.  They have the oldest and best-established cultural values.  That means they have a lot of people on their side, and that means they can make a lot of things happen with brute force.   The fact that a majority of Americans trace their ties to the conservatives’ cultural background back long before the founding of the United States helps a lot in that.  Whites are naturally the easiest people to convince that the Europeans conquered the world because the Christian god willed it to be so.  About 70% of Americans are Whites, which means that conservatives can win elections by building their political ideology on a completely fictitious version of history.

As a result of their well-established ideology, people learn more about conservative values as a result of their cultural background.  The conservatives’ cultural values are derived more directly from ancient myths than anyone else’s ideology, which means their cultural values are also the most simplistic.

Also, their ideology is pretty compatible with people’s natural perceptions of the world.  Conservatives do teach people cultural values and pass laws that conflict with people’s natural perceptions of the world, but every group of people in the world does that.  Violence and murder exist in every culture on Earth, but laws against murder and some types of violence exist in every culture on Earth also, so conservatives having those things also doesn’t make them special.  In fact, out of conservatives, liberals, and Anarchists, conservatives are the most prone to violence and killing—like, in the form of waging wars against people they perceive to be bad.

Since the conservatives’ values are so widespread among people for all of these reasons, it’s easy for individuals to perceive that everyone else knows them.  Since everyone knows that everyone else knows them, practicing them becomes a tribal ritual.  Everyone has to practice them just to be able to function in society among all the other people who practice them.  So conservative values would still serve an immediate practical purpose even if no individuals wanted to practice them.  A lot of disillusioned young people reject conservative values publicly, and a lot of older people reject them privately.  But when all these people meet up with each other in the day-to-day world, what do they do?  The older people try to impress everyone with their business professionalism by using conservative cultural values.  They talk like professionals, comb their hair like professionals, and wear conservative business suits—or conservative gas station attendant uniforms, or anything in between.  Most people can’t reject conservative values completely, because they don’t know how to survive in the world any other way.

Taken together, all of this means that conservatives’ greatest strength is the fact that their ideology requires the least amount of effort to teach people and requires the least amount of imagination to use.

The Globalization 4.0 revolution, unlike the War on Terrorism, is going to be waged—by our side, at least—with weaponized education.  The enemy can never be defeated until his ideology is defeated.  In order for our side to win, we must fight as effectively as possible.  That necessarily means that with every action we take, we must attack the enemy’s ideology.  To that, all else is secondary.  There are many ways to attack the enemy’s ideology, some of which I’m including in this book, and many more of which can be found in other places I direct you to in this book.
The conservatives’ main weakness is that their ideology is the least compatible with the way the world actually works.  Out of any group, whenever they use their ideology to make plans for the future, their plans are the least likely to work.  So more than any other group, they will defeat their ideology for us.  This is where a functional understanding of science serves us, along with the simple strategy of offering people choices.  If conservatives want to tell everyone that their ancestors conquered the world because their god willed it to be so, and we can readily outline how their differences in material resources gave them a more physically powerful civilization, basically anyone we meet—and especially people whose ancestors didn’t come from Europe—will find our version a lot more believable.  And our version can be explained as simply as by saying that the Mesopotamians had the best growing conditions in the world, developed agriculture first, were able to produce more food than anyone else, support more people than anyone else, and consequently built the biggest and most physically powerful civilization in the world.  And from that point, their conquest of the world is a simple matter of physics.  The conservatives can argue that their god led their ancestors to Mesopotamia, and we can’t argue against that… but do we really need to?  The only direction they have left to run from that point would be to say that their all powerful, all knowing, all loving god wanted them to conquer everyone else.  We can pretty much leave them on their own to sink their own ship from there.  If they believe that their all loving god wanted them to conquer everyone, kill lots of people, spread plagues, enslave people, and everything else, it’s not hard for even the most casual non-conservative observer to notice they have a severe misunderstanding of the most basic concept of an all loving god.  Alternately, they could be worshipping a god of war, murder, genocide, and oppression, doing his bidding, and simply calling him an all loving god, but to the casual observer, lying about who they worship isn’t any better.  Alternately they could say that their god made White people inherently superior to everyone else, but now they’re White supremacists, and the fact that we’re all members of the same species makes the possibility of racial superiority fundamentally impossible.  Alternately, they could say that their ancestors made a lot of mistakes, but now that they’ve built the most physically powerful civilization on Earth they better tell everyone what to do anyway, because they obviously know more than anyone else about how to build a civilization.  But the fact that they’re evolutionarily equal members of the same species as everyone else proves that they aren’t superior to anyone else, so they aren’t fundamentally more intelligent than anyone else.  Everyone knows basically the same amount about how to live in whatever living conditions they live in.  The fact that conservatives know so much about how to live the way they live doesn’t prove sh*t, and it wouldn’t be useful to anyone who lived a different way.

That’s just one example.  If you have a functional understanding of science, you can systematically destroy any argument the conservatives put forth and show how simple laws of physics made the world turn out the way it did.  And will continue to make the world work the way it does, instead of working the way the conservatives imagine it does—or rather, not working the way the conservatives imagine it does and proving it when all the things they predict are going to happen don’t happen.

With a functional understanding of science you can attack conservative ideology through the same governmental institutions they’re using to try to force their cultural values on everyone else.  The contents of these books are the Science of Human Equality and How to Not Have Wars with Each Other.  The whole point of public school is to teach kids things they’re going to need to know as adults, so there is no excuse why these things couldn’t be taught in public school.

Likewise, anyone who doesn’t care enough about the Science of Human Equality and How to Not Have Wars with Each Other to get a Ph.D. in it has no business running for president or for any other governmental office in a secular government of, by, and for the people.  There’s not much any anyone can do about that right now, because my work isn’t yet being taught at any accredited universities, and even if it was, it takes eight years to get a Ph.D..  But that’s the basic idea.  You can attack the ideology of any politician who isn’t an expert at human equality and how to not have wars with each other by asking simple questions that are scientifically valid but completely contradictory to their so-called secular government of, by, and for the people.  Questions like, “Senator McCain, if you are elected president, you will be making global decisions.  But you don’t have a Ph.D. in physics or biology or evolutionary psychology, or any other branch of science.  Obviously, learning how the world works has not been a very high priority for you.  So why do you believe, and more importantly, why should we believe, that you should be entrusted to make decisions that affect everyone in the world?”  Obviously, your goal isn’t to get an answer from him, but to show that he can’t answer it—or that his answer is completely incompatible with a secular government of, by, and for the people.

You can also attack conservative ideology through the court system.  Now that I’ve told you about the major reference books that have gone into these books, if you have to go to court to defend your civil rights, you can put together a defense that the judge can’t say no to.  Freedom of religion is a big one.  Right now, Wiccan and Pagan U.S. military personnel are getting killed in Iraq, but if they want to be buried in military graveyards among all those white crosses and Stars of David, they aren’t allowed to get Pentacles on their graves.  Or if you get in trouble for wearing Pentacles to work or school, or for looking up Pagan websites on public school computers, or whatever.  However human evolutionary science applies to your case, if you know what questions to ask, you won’t have to look far for expert witnesses.  Just about every college in America has a psychology department.

The conservatives’ biggest weakness is one they will exploit for you in the end.  All you need to do is to use the aikido to get them there.  Since their ideology is the least compatible with reality, if you and lots of other people all over the country start championing human equality, peace, and environmental sustainability, and winning victories everywhere you go with surgical precision, you’ll threaten them, and they’ll cling harder and harder to what they believe to be true about the world.  The only way they’ll be able to fight back will be to keep trying harder and harder to force everyone to agree with them.  And that will never work.  All they’re going to do is to prove to everyone they’re a bunch of a**holes.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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